Our Credibility Is All Wet.

Written by Tom Fitzmorris September 24, 2015 13:01 in

UnderTheTableSquare[title type="h3"]Another boil-water alert makes New Orleans look stupid.[/title]
If we can take a break from what Donald Trump says about Drew Brees's shoulder, may I be permitted to express outrage over the latest shutdown of the New Orleans water system? WATRGLASIn case you haven't heard, last night the Sewerage and Water Board once again discovered that the electric power system that keeps the pressure steady in New Orleans's dropped out. It always seems to happen at night. We found out about it in the middle of our Eat Club dinner at Richard Fiske's. We were all drinking water at the time. Most people kept on drinking water, unless the good Burgundy wines had all their attention. After all, we've come through other alerts on the same subject before. The outage isn't a major disaster. You know what to do. Boil any water you're going to drink, brush teeth with, make ice from, or wash dishes with. No big deal. In a day or two, the crisis will have passed. But what is unlikely to go away is the impression this will make on anyone who happens to be visiting New Orleans to dine in our restaurants or conduct business. What does a hotel guest who wants a sip of water or a shower do? Will he or she ever come back to New Orleans? Lots of other cities have good restaurants. Maybe not quite as good as ours, but given a choice between eating a five-star dish while wondering whether one will get sick or a three-star dish without those threats, what should you do? Stay here and cross your fingers, or never come back? Meanwhile, the high-handed attitude of the S&WB makes things even worse. Where is the web site explaining what's going on, what to do, and how long the problem will last? We don't even get Vic Schiro's famous false rumors. How hard is it, really, to fix this permanently? Should we all get portable decontamination kits? Or should we just let the North Shore, Metairie, and the West Bank take over the future of living around here? It's making us look like morons.