From the Times-Picayune:
The morning before Hurricane Katrina roared into New Orleans, Dave Howard got a call from his supervisors at the Sewerage & Water Board directing him to report to work at Jahncke Pumping Station No. 14 alongside the Lake Pontchartrain levee in eastern New Orleans.
. . .
[During the storm] the pumps kept running with one exception: A spell of two days early in the crisis, when the city’s water supply gave out and the pumps had to be shut down before they overheated.
During that lapse, Howard and his cohorts – including electricians John Alexander and Bobby Brouillette and diesel mechanic Steve Tregre – devised an alternative: They’d run one pump at a time until the temperature in the gear boxes reached 150 degrees. Then they’d shut it off and fire up the next one until it, too, was nearly fried.
The Thursday after the storm, Tregre came up with a better idea: Use the water from the Jahncke Canal, which the station pumps into the lake, to cool the pumps. Sure, the water was nasty and full of debris, but these were desperate times, with at least three feet of water – full of feeding alligator gars – pooled around the station and nearby homes virtually inundated.
Okay, so the fact that these pumps stayed up and running for most of the time is remarkable. So’s the fact that the engineers were able to keep them operational even without a reliable cooling mechanism.
What’s of interest to me, however, is those alligator gars. I mean, have you seen those freakin’ things? That’s some shit, yo.
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