When the Head of the Sewerage and Water Board, Ghassan Korban, made a case for replacing the entire Carrollton waterworks to President Biden on Thursday we wanted to know: Is it possible to replace the whole thing?
“Whoa!” he said. “That is beyond my pay grade! I can only imagine what that would cost. To estimate would take weeks, and a whole team of people. I cannot pull that rabbit out of my hat!”
So we went to Engineer H.J. Bosworth to get his professional view and his response was:
The sheer enormity of a complete rebuild and replacement of the Carrollton facility is one Bosworth says would possibly take a year to just review and plan.
He also tags the project at a cost of between 500 million and 2-billion dollars.
Bosworth says while he’s no expert on the condition of the Carrollton Plant, he says he doesn’t know if the facility is absolutely on its last legs.
“I don’t know if the whole water plant is toast,” he cracks. “But certainly they would want to acquire some property and they’re just about ready to fix Turbine #5, they got Turbine #4 near done. They’re doing all sorts of upgrades, all over the place, the clarifiers, the contact basins…”
He also contends the facility was well cared for up until about ten years ago.
“[You’re] talking about what could be a billion dollars to completely revamp the plant,” he says. “I don’t necessarily know if we need an entirely new plant. Certainly a few hundred million would be great to help fix the system and get our infrastructure straight.”
In the end, Bosworth may not be able to guess at how much it cost, but he appreciates Korban for telling the President New Orleans needs help.
“I’m glad that Mr. Korban made such a request to the President. I’m glad that the President is interested in infrastructure. And a place like New Orleans has an infrastructure that’s the poster-child of a crumbling infrastructure!”
