New Orleans saltwater battle could be far pricier than it has to be. Leaky pipes are to blame.

New Orleans’ decades-long struggle with leaking water mains has emerged as a major reason why the city’s potential battle against saltwater intrusion could be more than five times what Jefferson Parish expects to spend.

While the city’s population is 47,000 less than its upriver neighboring parish, New Orleans must produce 162 million gallons a day of freshwater for its residents and businesses, compared to only about 70 million gallons for Jefferson.

The difference is largely water leaking from hundreds of locations throughout the Sewerage & Water Board’s 1,600-mile system of water mains and distribution lines. While both New Orleans and Jefferson Parish have significant water demand by businesses, including hotels, it’s leakage that makes the city’s water demand significantly greater.

Because of the huge difference in water usage, New Orleans’ response to the saltwater threat, should it be needed, could run as high as an estimated $270 million. Jefferson Parish’s is expected to cost as much as $45 million. Both plans include pipelines, but Jefferson’s are much smaller.

The most recent detailed audit of S&WB water losses, published in 2019, concluded that 55.3% of all water produced in 2017 in New Orleans’ Carrollton and Algiers water treatment plants were categorized as “total real losses” — leaks. In comparison, a Jefferson Parish spokesperson said its total leakage losses were most recently estimated at only 23%.

“When you have a distribution system that is about 1,600 miles of pipes, and 800 miles of those are 80 years old or older, then you know you must have a plan” to restore the older parts of the system, said S&WB Executive Director Ghassan Korban. “This crisis – the salt water – brings to light the need to be more proactive and to think long term, beyond the interim or temporary fixes we need for this crisis.”

The same 2019 study that provided actual water loss estimates also produced another metric used by the American Water Works Association to measure long-term repair efforts of water systems in the U.S. and around the world.

It’s called an “infrastructure leak index,” and it attempts to capture both the amount of water lost and the underlying causes of those losses – broken pipes, main connections, pumps, and other issues – to create an apples-to-apples metric that is comparable with other water systems.

That metric had actually dropped to 36.9 in 2017, compared to 46.6 in 2009, an indicator that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city had made some progress in reducing water use.

But according to the AWWA’s scoring system, any score greater than 8 is unacceptable: “Although operational and financial considerations may allow a long-term infrastructure leakage index greater than 8.0, such a level of leakage is not an effective use of water as a resource.”

The city and S&WB have been working in fits and starts to speed up the repair process, including by demanding that FEMA and other federal agencies refocus post-Katrina and other post-storm restoration funds on a combined program aimed at rebuilding hundreds of miles of city streets and the water and sewer lines beneath them, in a series of combined projects.

The SWB also is in the midst of a long-term project to install so-called electronic “smart meters” to better measure water use at homes and businesses, both to get a better measure of water used, and to help end complaints of improper billing resulting from broken meters or meter readers using estimates when existing meters can’t be read. 

A 2015 “Joint Infrastructure Recovery Response Program” settlement agreement between city agencies and FEMA resulted in about $2.4 billion being set aside for reconstruction projects.

The program has so far resulted in the replacement of 45.3 miles of water mains, with another 42.6 miles under construction, and includes plans to replace another 108.2 miles of pipelines before the program’s funding expires.

But many of the projects have experienced delays in the last few years, resulting from both the COVID pandemic and from related supply shortages and inflation issues. The FEMA funding was supposed to expire in February of this year, long before all the money is spent, and city and S&WB officials have asked that it be extended until at least May 30, 2025.

If approved, construction projects put out to bid by that time could be completed through 2027, an S&WB spokesperson said.

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A look at the S&WB’s long-term capital improvements budget, covering fiscal years 2022 through 2031, indicates the agency actually spent $245.25 million on water projects – mostly pipe replacements – in 2022, with funding coming from FEMA and other federal agencies, and from the S&WB and city.

The agency expected to spend another $132.55 million in fiscal year 2023 on water line replacement projects. The long-term budget lists $452.9 million total for its 10 years, based on known funding sources, but Korban said the agency also is looking for other revenue resources to fill in the outlying years.

By the time the FEMA settlement expires, he said, “we want to have an alternative source of funding, or we cannot execute our capital improvement plan, meaning continuing the same pace of replacing water mains.”

He said the city’s recovery period after Katrina, which significantly damaged the water system, also slowed the replacement of older pipes that weren’t damaged then, but are now being added to the failure column.

“It wasn’t until maybe a dozen years ago that we started actual replacement of these Katrina-damaged water mains, and in that waiting time, other water mains have gotten into worse condition,” he said. “Today, we are in a worse situation because we’re all 15 to 20 years older and the water mains are now 80 to 100 years old.” 

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Last October, the S&WB proposed increasing water fees by 3% to 6% to help raise an additional $160 million a year for long-term capital projects. Korban said a portion of that money would be used to replace between 30 and 50 miles of older pipes a year.

It would be the first time water fees had been raised since 2012.

But the proposal immediately met criticism from residents and the City Council, in part caused by S&WB’s struggles to deal with its notoriously unreliable billing practices, and neighborhood complaints about how long it took to complete many of the street repair projects.

In a Feb. 28 report to Korban, New Orleans Inspector General Edward Michel pointed out that the agency still had more than $150 million in uncollected customer billings on its books, associated with 50,000 accounts. Half of those accounts were inactive, and their bills had been turned over to collection agencies.

He also cited the repeated complaints from customers about high or faulty bills, and service shutoffs.

“The OIG does not take a position on whether rate increases will ultimately be needed to cover the cost of capital projects,” Michel wrote. “However, in the interest of fiscal responsibility to the public, the OIG recommends SWBNO delay any request for a rate increase until the utility has made every attempt to recover monies validly owed to it.”

Korban said the S&WB already has been successfully reducing the amount of bad debts on its books, pointing to recent financial updates showing it has already cleared $10 million of the unpaid bills, and said finding additional funds for the water line replacement program remains a top priority.

“We haven’t been able to make a case to the decisionmakers (in favor of the fee increase) at this point,” he said. “We’re hoping that would change in the near future and we’re allowed to have a public dialog about the need for funding, and how we can keep the pace that we have enjoyed under the JIRR project.”