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Francine brought significant flooding in New Orleans

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Hurricane Francine brought power outages and flooding to Louisiana overnight, and the National Weather Service had to issue a sudden flash flood warning for New Orleans. Reporter Eva Tesfaye with member station WWNO joins us now with the latest from the city. Hey, Eva.

EVA TESFAYE, BYLINE: Hi.

SUMMERS: So, Eva, start by telling us, just how bad was the flooding there in New Orleans?

TESFAYE: Yeah. Well, I actually evacuated. I was worried about my cat and my car because the window is not closing. But I'm glad that I did because there was some flooding in New Orleans. My colleague Aubri Juhasz rode out the storm in a neighborhood called Bayou St. John. It doesn't have a reputation for flooding. But when Aubri and her friend looked outside during the eye of the storm, she saw the water in the street was rising up close to her car.

AUBRI JUHASZ, BYLINE: Is my car OK? There's a lot of water down there.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You might want to back up.

JUHASZ: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Well, I can't tell.

TESFAYE: So she moved her car to higher ground. But according to the Sewage and Water Board of New Orleans (ph), most of that water drained off the streets overnight. The worst of the flooding seemed to have happened in nearby Jefferson Parish, especially in the suburban town of Kenner. The police chief of Kenner said last night that there was no part of the city that wasn't affected by flooding. He told the local TV station that it's the worst flooding he's seen since Katrina.

SUMMERS: Wow. OK. Bow, I understand that the storm hit while the ground was already saturated from rain that had been coming down in the past week. Is that right?

TESFAYE: Yeah, that's right. And Francine also just dumped a lot of rain. It slowed down as it got towards the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. So that's where New Orleans, Metairie and Kenner are. And some rainfall totals were as high as 12 inches in some of those areas. Also, Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng said three out of the four drainage pumps stopped working in Kenner. This is what she said.

CYNTHIA LEE SHENG: We were just outpaced with the sheer amount and volume of water that Hurricane Francine dumped on us.

TESFAYE: So the city of New Orleans also had some pump issues last night, but it seems like they were resolved more quickly, so that might be why Kenner experienced way more flooding than New Orleans.

SUMMERS: Yeah. We've talked about the rainfall, the flooding, of course. I'm curious about power outages and just how widespread they were.

TESFAYE: Yeah. So at one point last night, at least 400,000 customers had power outages. And that's something people here prepare for whenever storms hit, you know, charging devices, flashlights. Some people have generators, although you need to be careful with those. A lot of people remember that during Hurricane Ida in 2021, it took weeks to restore power in many places. So hopefully people were prepared. But for Francine, the hardest hit in terms of power outages were the coastal parts of southeast Louisiana. That's where the hurricane made landfall. So some examples of Dulac and Cocodrie, those are small towns down on the coast, and they saw wind speeds of almost a hundred miles per hour. And they're still assessing the damages.

SUMMERS: So just generally speaking, did the infrastructure hold up? Or have officials learned some lessons here, maybe?

TESFAYE: Yeah. I talked to the Sewage and Water Board of New Orleans to try to answer that question. Ghassan Khorban is the executive director, and this was his assessment.

GHASSAN KHORBAN: I really have to give a huge shout-out to my staff who just - all hands on deck, all night long. But at the same time, we know for a fact that some things didn't go right, and we own up to it.

TESFAYE: I asked if they're making changes so that the system can handle more rain. Our system can't really handle a lot of rain. And they said that they're cleaning out pipes, removing sediment from the canals. A longer-term goal is getting a new power station up and running and having more green infrastructure in the city like ponds and permeable surfaces that can absorb more water. For now, the state of emergency is still in effect in Louisiana.

SUMMERS: Eva Tesfaye with member station WWNO in New Orleans. Eva, thank you.

TESFAYE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Eva Tesfaye