The details
The Power Protection Initiative was announced during a June 24 news conference, where Mayor John Whitmire and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner revealed the initiative will ensure that essential city facilities maintain power during and after disasters or grid outages by equipping facilities with permanent natural gas generators.
Brian Mason, the city's Office of Emergency Management director, told City Council that of the 300 city sites that don’t have backup generators, the 140 facilities were identified as priority assets, including:
- Multiservice centers serving as places of refuge
- Fire and police stations
- Drinking water repump stations
- Wastewater lift stations
- Public libraries and community centers
Installations of the generators will be completed over the next three years, according to previous Community Impact reporting.
What you need to know
City Council passed a plan Aug. 13 that would allocate $314 million in federal funding toward disaster aid, with $100 million going toward backup generators, according to previous Community Impact reporting.
However, Mason told council that while the funding helps, it won’t solve the whole problem, as some facilities, such as lift stations and pump stations, may cost millions just to add backup generators.
“All this is going to come down to, we’re going to have a budget, we’re going to have a number and we’re going to have to go through and make difficult choices,” Mason said. “We can do this one, but we may not be able to do that one.”
He also said the use of federal funds often comes with restrictions.
“Just because we identify that as a critical facility, that may not meet the HUD requirements or the [Federal Emergency Management Agency] requirements to be able to use that grant money,” Mason said. “It’s a very complicated dance of looking at all the different things available, funding sources, efficiency benefits and trying to get all that to merge together as efficiently as we can.”
Mason said there is currently no estimated price for adding backup generators to each facility, as the city begins discussing more in-depth designs for each one and what they need.
