October 9, 2006—A member of the New Orleans City Council is pushing for rescission of the city's emergency ordinance allowing homeowners to waive inspections before restoration of electricity at their Katrina-flooded houses. The ordinance has been criticized by city officials and electrical experts as a failure in basic building safety.
"I am not comfortable with the self-inspection program," says New Orleans District B City Councilwoman Stacy Head. "I am going to push for a revocation of that rule. If the city needs to hire more inspectors to ensure electrical safety in homes, we need to hire them. It's a life and safety issue."
Head expects to bring the issue before the council's Housing Committee this week, then bring up self-inspection for immediate revocation by the full council at its next meeting, scheduled for November 1 according to the city's website city's website. She says electrical contractors will present evidence to the committee about the poor work found in quality-control checks of self-inspections and the dangers that could result from the illegal reuse of wiring and electrical equipment that was submerged in the flood.
The decision about the self-inspection solution is one result of the irregular dynamics of storm restoration. The same problems faced other Gulf Coast communities, which handled them in different ways. In New Orleans, though, the major reconstruction effort, coupled with the loss of most of the city's electrical inspectors, has led to an extraordinary backlog of permit requests for an inspection department that is extremely understaffed.
"The city lost critical manpower during the storm, including building and electrical inspectors. So we had shortages there at a time of the greatest demand and need," says New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, District E. "We needed to get 100,000 properties back on line. We had to do a reality check of the situation."
Reality Check Spawns Inspection Shortcut
The New Orleans ordinance was originally passed in January 2006 to relieve the permit bottleneck. Under the emergency self-inspection program, a homeowner and a licensed electrical contractor sign an affidavit, swearing that the repair work at that residence is done to the standards of the International Building Code 2000. The city's Department of Safety and Permits then gives Entergy, the local electric utility company, the okay to reconnect power to that home.
City Council, says Willard-Lewis, acted on the advice and recommendation of Department of Safety & Permits Director Mike Centineo, who asked for the self-inspection waiver. Councilwoman Head, who was not on the council when the ordinance was first approved, says that when the issue came up before its initial expiration on July 31, 2006, she expected the waiver would end. She was surprised that Centineo recommended extending it.
"The idea presented was that we would basically be stopping the reconstruction of the city if we didn't renew the self-inspections," says Head. She says she deferred to Centineo's judgment on the need to expedite inspections and that the quality of the self-inspection work was adequate. Willard-Lewis also says that she approved the extension on Centineo's advice.
Centineo was unavailable for comment on the ordinance.
