Louisiana Co-ops Plan How to House Thousands of Workers

Franklinton, La.—Charles Hill recalls having a meeting a week before Hurricane Katrina hit.

“We talked about it, and I had it all planned out where we could handle 500 people,” the manager of engineering and operations for Washington-St. Tammany Electric Cooperative said.

After the storm hit, nine times that many came in to help.

And the co-op learned that accommodating 4,500 people after a natural disaster is anything but easy.

“The hotel rooms were gone. They were full or blown away,” Hill said.

“They filled up all the gyms with evacuees” from New Orleans, some 70 miles to the south, added Walt Sylvest, the co-op’s chief financial officer.

Two years after the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, WSTE is among the co-ops to have taken steps aimed at keeping the logistical part of any future storm from becoming a nightmare.

“Our storm plan went from a quarter-inch thick to an inch thick,” Hill said.

It includes contracts with churches and associations that the co-op would need assistance from in order to care for out-of-town crews.

“Everybody has an assignment for filling those logistical things like bedding, clothes washing, catering,” Sylvest noted.

“Logistics is the nightmare,” agreed Lee Hedegaard, CEO and general manager of Singing River Electric Power Association, Lucedale, Miss., which was hit hard by Katrina.

“The hardest thing is not rebuilding the power lines. The guys know how to do that. The hardest thing for co-ops is logistics—managing the food and the motel rooms and the clothes,” said Hedegaard.

Despite the bumps in the road, Washington-St. Tammany—which suffered some $100 million in damage—is thankful for the outpouring of help.

“One of the things that still amazes me is the number of co-ops that came to our rescue. It was just staggering,” said Hill, who felt sorry for crews from cooler climates who were unused to the heat and humidity that followed the storm.

As Sylvest put it, “We’re forever grateful.”

Source: Michael W. Kahn, Electric Co-op Today

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