In the summer of 1900, on a street at the edge of New Orleans, a man was digging in the middle of standing water. The trench was four feet wide and six feet deep, and it had been open since the previous morning. Its walls were held by wooden boards driven into the face of the cut and braced across the gap with horizontal timbers, so the waterlogged soil would not push inward. On the surface, a pump drew groundwater from the excavation at a rate the engineers had calculated would keep the bottom workable.
The calculation was nearly right. Three inches of water still lay in the bottom of the ditch. The pump was a centrifugal unit driven by a small steam engine, and the engine burned coal that had been connected at sunrise, and the man at the bottom of the trench was not responsible for the coal or the pump or the steam engine. He was responsible for the clay in the bottom of the trench, which he broke with a pick and lifted with a shovel to a platform on the surface.
The clay was gray and dense and wet in the way that material is wet when it has never dried once in the history of the ground it occupies. It did not come out clean. It came out in heavy lumps that crumbled under their own weight and required two or three shovel lifts to clear the depth the supervisor had set for this section of the main. When a lump came out in one piece, it weighed about as much as the man lifting it.
He was building the sewer system of the city of New Orleans. He was building it from the bottom, in water, through material that was saturated and would remain saturated once the pump stopped, and throughout every hour the pump could not keep pace with the groundwater pressing through the trench walls and up through the floor from below. He was building the solution to the very condition he stood in. His name is not in the records.
This is the story of how a city that should not exist built the system that allowed it to keep existing: a network of underground pipes, open canals, and pumping stations moving water out of a city that sits below the level of the water trying to drown it. And of the men who built it, what was recorded of them and what was not. To understand what the drainage system was built against, you have to understand what New Orleans is and where it sits, and why water is not background conditions to the city’s history but its central fact. New Orleans lies on the east bank of the Mississippi River, about one hundred miles from where the river meets the Gulf of Mexico.
The Mississippi has been depositing sediment at this location for thousands of years, forming a delta of branching channels, swamps, and organic material that extends south and east into the gulf in terrain that is neither quite land nor quite water, but the accumulated product of a continental drainage system dropping its load where the river slows. The delta is built by flood deposits and degraded by compaction, subsidence, and the oxidation of organic material when exposed to air. It is not stable ground in the way that bedrock or glacial till is stable ground. It is the youngest and most dynamic land surface in North America.
The city sits on the natural levees the river has built along its banks over millennia of floods. A natural levee is that slight rise that forms where a flooding river drops its coarser sediment near the channel before finer material is carried to the back swamps. The French Quarter, the oldest part of the city, sits on this rise. It is the highest ground in New Orleans.
At its highest points, it rises about two to three feet above sea level. The ground slopes away from the river in both directions, toward the river’s south bank on one side and toward Lake Pontchartrain to the north on the other. By the time you reach the back of the natural levee and enter the low ground between the river and the lake, you are at sea level or below it. In the deepest parts of what were called in 1900 the uninhabitable back-of-town areas, you are five or six feet below the level of the Mississippi, held back by the artificial levees the Army Corps of Engineers maintained along the river’s banks.
This was the physical reality the drainage engineers had to deal with. The city was a bowl. The bowl collected water. The water had no gravity outlet.
Rain that fell on the city fell on a surface that could not drain by the mechanism that moves water in any other setting, the mechanism of water flowing downhill. Because the slope from New Orleans was toward the inside of the bowl, and the inside of the bowl was New Orleans. Water had been killing New Orleans since the city existed. Not all at once, and not only in the floods from levee failures and storm surge, though those happened too.
The water that killed New Orleans in ordinary years was the water that collected in the streets after rain, settled in the open drainage canals and the low ground on the city’s edges, and gathered in the cisterns, ponds, and abandoned excavations produced by a city of two hundred thousand people spread across a low subtropical basin. That water was the breeding ground of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the carrier of yellow fever. The mosquito needed standing water to complete its breeding cycle. New Orleans provided standing water constantly in every season warm enough to support the insect, which covered most of the year in Louisiana.
Yellow fever had been ravaging New Orleans in successive waves since the eighteenth century. The epidemic of 1853 killed 7,849 people in a city of about 115,000. The epidemic of 1878 killed nearly 4,000 in New Orleans and spread up the Mississippi Valley to kill more than 20,000 across the region. In the years between the great epidemics, the disease was endemic, appearing every summer in smaller numbers and killing regularly enough that New Orleans developed an entire culture around its seasonal arrival.
Families who could afford to leave departed before the start of summer and returned when the first killing frost of autumn ended the season. The people who could not leave stayed. They died at higher rates than those who could go. Nineteenth-century medicine did not understand the mechanism by which yellow fever killed.
The disease was linked to bad air, to filth, to the miasmas rising from the standing water and decomposing organic matter in the low city. The link was not entirely wrong. Standing water was the core problem. The mechanism was the mosquito and not the smell, but the practical conclusion that eliminating standing water would reduce disease was correct, regardless of whether the reasoning that led to it was correct.
The sanitation reformers of New Orleans, who argued through the 1870s and 1880s that the city needed a comprehensive drainage system to eliminate standing water, made the right argument without knowing all the reasons it was right. The mosquito-yellow fever link was not scientifically confirmed until 1900, when the Walter Reed Commission in Havana verified the work of the Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay. By then, the sanitation reformers had been making their case for thirty years. The politicians who received the argument across those thirty years read the engineering estimates and declined to act.
The estimates were enormous. The city’s finances were shaky. Yellow fever came in summer and retreated in autumn, and with it retreated the impetus to act. The ferries kept carrying the dead to the above-ground cemeteries of a city that built its graves that way because the water table was too high to bury the dead below it.
The drainage canals kept holding standing water. The mosquitoes kept breeding. The engineering dilemma of draining New Orleans is not a drainage problem in the traditional sense. In conventional drainage problems, water falls on high ground and flows by gravity through pipes and ditches toward lower ground, where it collects in streams, rivers, or bays, and eventually reaches the ocean.
Gravity does the work. The engineers’ task is to provide a path for the water to follow gravity to where it wants to take it. In New Orleans, gravity works against the city. Most of the city’s surface lies below the level of the Mississippi on the south side, which is held back by the levees.
The back of the city lies below the level of Lake Pontchartrain on the north side, which any drainage system would have to discharge into eventually. The ground beneath the city is saturated with water at depths of no more than four or five feet below the surface, sometimes less. When it rains in New Orleans, the water that falls on the city finds no downhill path out. Water accumulates in the streets.
Water seeps into the first floors of low buildings. Water moves as a current through intersections, carrying with it everything in the streets: the contents of gutters, privies, dumps, industrial yards, slaughterhouses, and every other facility a city of this size distributes across its surface. To remove that water from the city, you must lift it. You must move it upward against gravity from its current level to the level of Lake Pontchartrain, six to eight feet above the lowest parts of the city, and pump it into the lake.
The pumps must run continuously, not just during and after rainfall, but permanently, because the city’s soil is saturated at all times, and groundwater constantly presses upward through the soil into basements, building foundations, utility trenches, and any space that can hold it. If the pumps stop, the city floods, not from rain but from the ground beneath it. This was what the Louisiana legislature charged the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board with solving in 1899. The board received authority over the city’s sewerage, drainage, and water supply systems, replacing the fragmented and underfunded arrangements that had governed each system separately over the previous decades.
The board was given the power to issue revenue bonds and levy assessments on property within its service area. It was given engineering authority over a project of a size never before attempted in American municipal engineering. The city’s population was 287,000. Annual rainfall averaged sixty-four inches.
The drainage area to be served covered the entire inhabited city and the low ground beyond it that urban expansion was beginning to reach. The volume of water that had to be removed after a typical summer thunderstorm, the kind that could drop two inches of rain in forty-five minutes on one section of the city, exceeded what any existing centrifugal pump technology could handle in the time available before flooding became structurally destructive. The man who would eventually solve the pump problem had not yet turned twenty when the Sewerage and Water Board was created. Archibald Baldwin Wood was born in New Orleans in 1879.
His father was an engineer. He studied engineering at Tulane University and graduated in 1899, the year the board was founded. He joined the board’s engineering staff four years later, in 1903, under chief engineer George Earl. He was assigned to the problem that the existing centrifugal pumps in service had consistently failed to solve: how to move enough volume, fast enough, to protect the city from its own rain events.
A centrifugal pump works by spinning water in a chamber and using centrifugal force to push the water outward and upward through a discharge pipe. It is efficient at moving moderate volumes against moderate pressure, the vertical height the water must be lifted. It is less efficient when the volume is very large and the pressure is low, which is the drainage situation in New Orleans. The city needed to move enormous volumes of water upward a short distance, six to eight feet in most cases, from the low elevation of the drainage mains to the elevation of the canals and the lake.
For this situation, the centrifugal pump was the wrong geometry. The pump Wood designed had a different geometry. A large-diameter impeller, an axial-flow propeller, set at an angle in a concrete or steel casing, rotating in a direction that pushed water from the lower end to the upper end of the casing. Water entered from below, moved axially through the rotating blades, and exited at the top at the higher elevation.
The flow was not centrifugal but axial. Water moved in the direction of the shaft’s axis, rather than outward from it. For low-head, high-volume applications, the axial-flow impeller moved water more efficiently than any centrifugal design of comparable power. Wood’s first large-scale installation was at Pumping Station Number Six on the 17th Street Canal, completed in 1913.
The pump was fourteen feet in diameter. It was driven by a 2,000-horsepower electric motor. Its rated capacity was 250,000 gallons per minute. At that rate, it moved 15 million gallons per hour.
No pump in municipal sewerage service anywhere in the United States had a comparable flow rate and efficiency. Wood patented the design in 1913. Copies of his machine were made for cities in Holland. Dutch hydraulic engineers, who had spent centuries managing water in lowlands, studied them and recognized that Wood’s design was an improvement on what they had built.
The pump was named for him. Pumping Station Number Six still contains Wood screw pumps. They are still in service today. They have been in service for nearly 110 years.
The workforce that built the New Orleans drainage system was the same workforce that built New Orleans in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and most of them were Black. In 1900, the Black population of New Orleans was about 77,000, nearly 27 percent of the city’s total. This community was rooted in the colonial era among free people of color and the enslaved men and women who had built the city’s infrastructure before the war, and among the freed people who stayed in New Orleans after emancipation and built institutions and neighborhoods in the decades that followed. In the New Orleans construction industry under Jim Crow, Black workers held the employment categories the racial hierarchy of the southern labor market assigned to them: physical labor, materials handling, work that required bodies rather than scientific credentials.
The trench-digging crews for the main lines were mostly Black. The pipe-laying crews that handled and placed the sections of glazed clay pipe in the excavated trenches were mostly Black. The concrete crews that mixed, poured, and finished the foundations for the pumping station basins were mostly Black. The laborers who moved materials from delivery wagons to the work sites, from work sites to spoil piles, and between the various stations of a construction site that required muscle rather than job classification were mostly Black.
The foremen directing those crews were white. The engineers who designed the work were white. The contractors who held construction contracts with the Sewerage and Water Board were white. The wages paid to Black workers on the drainage construction in the years around 1900 were set by a labor market that built racial discrimination into the structure of its compensation as clearly as it built skill differentials.
A Black day laborer in the drainage trenches earned between one dollar and a dollar and a quarter a day. A white skilled worker on the same project, a carpenter building a pumping station or a mason laying a station’s walls, earned between $2. 50 and $3. 50 a day for recognized craft work.
This disparity was not incidental to the project budget. It was a structural feature of the labor cost estimates the board’s engineers used to make bond financing possible. The system was built at the price it was built at, in part, because the men doing the hardest physical work in the most dangerous conditions were paid the least. The Black workforce of New Orleans in 1900 came mostly from the city itself and the surrounding parishes of southeast Louisiana, where men who had come out of the sugarcane and cotton economies of the river parishes found in the wages of a large urban construction project something better than the fields offered them, even if that something better meant less than the wages of white workers on the same site.
They came to work because it was the best work available to them. They dug in water because the work was in water. They worked in heat because the work was in heat. Digging in New Orleans is not like digging anywhere else.
In most kinds of ground, you break the surface and remove material, and the walls of your excavation stand while you work beneath them. The soil has friction between its particles. The particles hold their position. The trench walls are stable.
In New Orleans, at four feet below the surface, you are below the water table. The soil at that depth is not dry particles held by friction. It is saturated material held in place by the hydraulic pressure of the groundwater moving through it. Remove material from a trench, and the material adjacent to the excavation has nothing to push against.
It moves inward. Without shoring, the wooden boards driven into the trench walls and braced across the opening, the walls close. A closed trench buries whoever is at the bottom. The shoring crews drove boards into the trench face as the digging advanced, building a wooden box around the work space at the bottom of the trench.
The boards were driven with sledgehammers and secured with braces placed against the opposite face. They were placed before the men went down. The men worked in the bottom of the trench in the space the shoring provided, with groundwater seeping through the gaps in the boards and rising from the trench floor regardless of the pump on the surface. The pump on the surface ran all day.
It ran all night during the shifts when work continued after dark. It drew groundwater from the bottom of the trench at a rate the engineers calculated would keep the excavation workable. Enough water was removed to leave the bottom material dense enough to hold a man’s weight without sinking to his ankles, and soft enough to be broken with a pick and lifted with a shovel. The calculations were not always precise.
When the pump lagged, the water level rose. When the water rose, the men in the bottom worked submerged in more of it. They worked in standing water in the heat of a Louisiana summer, over soil that held the heat of the subtropical sun in its saturated mass and released it upward into the air of the trench, where there was no shade for the workers and no air movement. Surface temperatures in New Orleans in August reach the low nineties Fahrenheit.
Humidity over the waterlogged ground of the city exceeds 90 percent in the morning. The dew point in August is in the low eighties Fahrenheit. In a trench four or five feet below the surface, the air is warmer and stiller than the air above it. There is no wind below ground level.
The men in the bottom of the drainage trenches in the summer months of New Orleans worked in conditions that the occupational health standards of a later era would require rotating on a schedule set by a physician. In 1900, no such standards existed. The men finished their shifts. They came back the next day or they did not.
The construction records logged progress in linear feet of trench completed and pipe laid. They did not record how many workers finished a shift unable to stand up straight. The pipe sections were lowered into the prepared trench from the surface using a wooden derrick and a chain rigged to a tripod at the head of the trench. A section of thirty-six-inch glazed clay sewer pipe weighed about eight hundred pounds, and the men below had to guide it into position in the bottom of the trench.
The joint had to be made. The bell end of the incoming pipe was set over the spigot end of the section already in place. The joint was packed with oakum and sealed with hydraulic cement. The work was precise, performed by men standing in water in the bottom of a shored trench, in the heat, handling sections of ceramic pipe weighing eight hundred pounds swinging on a chain above their heads.
Working under suspended weights was not the most comfortable part of the operation. The pumping stations required by the drainage system were industrial facilities on the scale of the city’s largest manufacturing plants. Pumping Station Number One, the first major station in the system, was completed in 1903 on South Claiborne Avenue. It was a brick and structural steel building housing the turbine generators that produced the electricity to run the pumps, the centrifugal pumping plant itself, and the electrical switchgear and mechanical support systems needed to keep it operating.
The station generated its own power because the city’s electrical grid in 1903 was not adequate to supply the loads required by the drainage pumps. The station was a power plant as well as a pump room. It burned coal. The coal arrived by wagon.
The coal crews, who unloaded, moved, and fed the coal through the station’s operating hours, worked in the conditions coal firing has always produced: hot, dirty, and continuous. Building the pumping station basins, the large underground concrete structures housing the pumping plant, required excavation fifteen or twenty feet below the surface in New Orleans soil. At fifteen feet below ground level in New Orleans, the material is not clay in the structural sense. It is decomposed organic material, the compressed remains of the swamp vegetation the site supported before the city was built over it.
It has a bearing capacity like wet sand at best, and far less at depth. The foundation engineers determined that wooden piles driven to firm material beneath the organic clay were the only means of anchoring a stable foundation. The pile-driving crews worked at the pumping station sites the way lake-bottom pile drivers had worked two decades before them: a crane, a hammer, a pile, and a count of blows, driving until resistance says stop. The concrete poured into those basins was mixed by revolving-drum mixers fed by men with shovels moving aggregate and Portland cement from material piles.
The mixers were powered by small gasoline engines. The laborers working the excavation placed the concrete and directed the mixed material from the mixer chute into the forms the carpenters had built. The ironworkers cut, bent, and placed the reinforcing steel that strengthened the concrete. The whole process involved dozens of individual skilled and unskilled operations coordinated by a site supervisor whose job was to keep material moving to the right place at the right time in the right sequence.
When the sequence broke down, when concrete arrived before the rebar was placed, or the rebar was in place and the formwork had not arrived, the operation stopped. The stoppage appeared in the construction records as a delay in production. It appeared in the payroll records as hours not worked. The open drainage canals that connected the underground pipe system to the pumping stations, and the stations to Lake Pontchartrain, were excavated across the low back-of-town ground by steam shovels in the wide sections and by hand digging where equipment could not be placed.
The spoil from the canal cuts was placed along the banks, raising the bank surface slightly above the surrounding level, which formed the distinguishing feature of the natural canal landscape of New Orleans: a raised strip of spoil flanking the waterway on both sides. The high ground of the canal bank was built from the low ground it was cut from. The 17th Street Canal, which became the main artery on the west side of the city and the site of Wood’s largest pumping installation, ran about five miles from the pumping station to the lake. The canal was cut through waterlogged ground sixty feet wide and twelve feet deep below the bank surface.
The excavation advanced through the same gray clay and decomposed organic material the trench crews worked through at every pipe-laying site in the city. The same material that held water and released it at intervals, and collapsed into any opening left unsupported. The steam shovels worked in the water in the bottom of the excavated canal. The men who finished the slopes of the banks and removed the material the shovels had loosened but not moved worked in the water beside them.
When the canal excavation reached the edge of the lake, when the pumping station basins were complete, when the pipes connecting the street mains to the station intakes were in place, the hydraulic circuit was closed. Water falling on the streets of the served drainage area could now move by gravity through the underground mains to the pumping station intake. The pumps lifted it to the level of the canal. The canal carried it to the lake.
The lake received it. The calculations worked. It cost the Sewerage and Water Board millions in bond money and several years of construction to prove those calculations. It cost the men at the bottom of the trenches a price the bond ledgers did not record.
The yellow fever epidemic of 1905 was the last major outbreak of the disease in the United States. It killed 452 people in New Orleans. The epidemic came five years after the start of the drainage construction program, after enough of the system had entered service to begin reducing, not eliminating, the conditions the disease required in the worst mosquito habitats of the back of town. The mosquito-disease link had been confirmed by Walter Reed’s work in Cuba five years earlier.
By 1905, the city’s public health authorities knew what they had not known in 1878. They knew that eliminating standing water, and the containers in which Aedes aegypti laid its eggs, would reduce mosquito numbers and limit disease transmission. They were acting on that knowledge. They had not finished acting on it when the 1905 epidemic arrived.
The men who built the drainage system built it while the disease it was designed to prevent was still circulating, and some of them died of it. The city’s death records for 1905 record deaths by cause and by race, because the city kept its vital statistics with the rigor a municipality that had managed recurring epidemics had learned to apply. What those records do not contain is any systematic identification of which of the dead had been working on the drainage construction in the months before their deaths. A laborer who died of yellow fever in August 1905 in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans may or may not have spent that summer digging pipe trenches on the edge of the city.
The link between his work and his death is not in the death certificate. What the construction records show is that the work continued through the epidemic. The Sewerage and Water Board had bonds coming due. The bonds had repayment schedules.
The repayment schedules contained no provisions for workforce deaths. The drainage system continued to be built on the schedule the engineers had drawn and the bond purchasers had financed. The men who died were replaced by other men who needed the work. Deaths on the New Orleans drainage construction project are not fully documented in any publicly available record.
Construction industry deaths in early twentieth-century Louisiana were subject to state labor law requirements far less comprehensive than those of later decades, enforced with the attention a southern state gave to labor law in 1903, which did not match the attention given by an industrial northern state in the same year, and certainly not the attention federal OSHA standards would require seven decades later. A man killed in a trench collapse at a drainage construction site in New Orleans in 1902 had his death recorded in the city’s death register. His employer was not required to report the accident to a state occupational safety authority in a way that would be findable today. His family had no claim for compensation under any state workers’ compensation law, because Louisiana did not enact workers’ compensation legislation until 1914.
A trench collapse killing a man working in New Orleans’s waterlogged soil was not a rare event in a construction project that involved digging hundreds of miles of trenches over two decades. It was an occupational hazard understood by the men who worked below ground level, and it was supposed to be mitigated by the shoring. The shoring failed when it was driven into ground that could not hold the boards at the required depth, or when a crew installed it faster than specifications required, or when the groundwater pressure against the trench walls exceeded the resistance the shoring provided. When the shoring failed, it failed fast.
A man at the bottom of a trench has no escape route faster than a wall collapsing. The cost records of building the drainage system in terms of the lives of the men who built it differ from the cost records in terms of bond interest and contractor invoices. The second record exists in the board’s published reports, issued annually and held in the Sewerage and Water Board archives and the Louisiana State Archives. The first record is a combination of death certificates, contractor payroll documents, newspaper notices, and family memories that have survived the 120 years since the work was done.
Whether that record has ever been systematically compiled, and what it would show, is not present in the written accounts in public circulation about the New Orleans drainage system. The drainage system was not completed on a single date or with a single celebration. It was built in stages, each stage adding coverage to drainage areas not previously served, each stage requiring the same construction process: excavation, pipe, backfill, connection to the nearest station, and expansion of the station to handle the additional flow the first stage required. By roughly 1910, the main drainage areas of the inhabited city were substantially served.
The transformation of the back-of-town areas was visible and tangible. Land that had been uninhabitable swamp in 1890 was now dry. Streets that had been flooded with standing water for days after rain were dry within hours after the Wood pumps entered service. The mosquito breeding habitat shrank.
Yellow fever, which had ravaged New Orleans every summer for 150 years, did not appear in major epidemic form after 1905. The neighborhoods that developed over the former swamps after the drainage system made them habitable were among the fastest-growing in the urban area during the 1910s and 1920s. Mid-City, Gentilly, Lakeview. The parts of New Orleans the drainage system opened to residential development were the parts that postwar expansion would fill in the 1940s and 1950s, the parts where working-class and middle-class families built homes that the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration mortgage market put within reach.
Those neighborhoods exist because the back-of-town became dry. The back-of-town became dry because the Sewerage and Water Board built the system, and because the men at the bottom of the trenches dug it. The opening of each major pumping station was an occasion for speeches and photographs. The members of the Sewerage and Water Board appeared in the photographs.
The responsible engineers appeared in the photographs. A. Baldwin Wood, when his pump design was displayed and the engineering press covered its performance, received the recognition any significant innovation earned in the technical literature of its time. His name is on the machine.
The pump is called the Wood screw pump. He is referred to in the history of New Orleans drainage engineering as the man whose design made the system fit for the city’s needs. He deserves that description. The foreman of the first trench-digging crew on Canal Boulevard appears in no photograph published in any record of the system’s construction.
The names of the pipe layers who set the first sections of the thirty-six-inch main are not in those records. The laborers who dug in the water in the summer of 1900 and the summer of every year that followed until the system was substantially complete are recorded in the payrolls of the Sewerage and Water Board and its construction contractors, in whatever form those records have survived the 120 years between. Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans on August 29, 2005. The storm surge Katrina pushed into Lake Pontchartrain through the waterways from the east raised the lake several feet above its normal level.
The surge pressed against the earthen levees and concrete floodwalls along the drainage canals leading from the pumping stations to the lake. The floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal failed under the pressure. The walls broke. Lake water pressing on the outside of the walls entered the city through the breaches and spread into the drainage areas the canals served, the low-lying neighborhoods of Lakeview, Gentilly, and Mid-City.
The neighborhoods built on land that had been swamp and that the drainage system had made habitable a century before. The failures were not failures of the drainage system. They were failures of the levees and floodwalls. The canals did not overtop their banks.
The walls adjacent to the canals collapsed under lateral pressure. They were not designed to resist the storm surges Katrina produced. This distinction matters because it separates what the early twentieth-century drainage works created from what they did not create. The mains, the pump basins, the canal excavations, and the station foundations held.
The walls meant to keep the storm out were not part of what the Sewerage and Water Board built at the turn of the century. They were a later addition built to standards the storm exceeded. The pumping stations flooded when the levees failed. The electrical systems that powered the pumps were flooded.
The pumps stopped. The city, which had needed continuous pumping to remain habitable since 1903, had no working pumps at the moment it most needed them. The flood that followed was the flood the drainage system was designed to prevent, not the storm surge the levees were supposed to hold back, but the accumulation of stormwater with rainwater and groundwater that the stopped pumps could no longer discharge. When the water was pumped out by emergency equipment and the National Guard and the restored electrical grid, and the permanent system was repaired and returned to service, the Sewerage and Water Board’s engineering staff inspected the Wood screw pumps at Pumping Station Number Six.
The pumps had been submerged. They had been without power for weeks. They had been installed ninety-two years before the storm. The inspection showed they were still operable.
When power was restored and the motors were started, the pumps worked. They are working now. The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans operates today as it has operated since 1899, continuously, because it cannot stop without the city stopping. The drainage canals carry surface water from the streets to the stations.
The stations pump it upward to the lake. The lake receives it. The cycle runs without interruption because the ground beneath New Orleans requires it to run without interruption. The pumps do not take weekends.
The pumps do not take August off for the heat. The pumps run because New Orleans sits below sea level, and the water seeking to reclaim it does not rest. The Wood screw pumps at Pumping Station Number Six are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Pumping Station Number Six itself is a New Orleans landmark.
This engineering achievement, conceived by Baldwin Wood in that building, has been recognized in engineering references, in historic preservation designations, and in the public record of a city that knows, to some extent, that the machine in that building is the reason the city exists. His name is on the commemorative plaque at the station. It has been on the plaque since the plaque was placed. The names of the men who dug the trenches, laid the pipe, poured the concrete, and drove the piles for the pumping station foundations are not on the plaque.
They are in the payroll books of the contractors who employed them and in the daily work records of the Sewerage and Water Board’s construction department, in whatever form those records exist today, wherever they are kept, and whether anyone has read them with the purpose of recovering what they contain about the men who did the work. If the streets of New Orleans are dry after a summer storm, they are dry because the drainage system those men built still works. If the neighborhoods of Mid-City, Gentilly, and Lakeview exist as neighborhoods, they exist because the system those men built made the ground beneath them habitable. If the city of New Orleans has a population, an economy, and a culture that people elsewhere know, visit, and value, that city exists in part on ground those men made usable by removing the water that had always been there.
The system they built still runs. The current moves through the pipes beneath the streets toward the stations on the canals. The pumps lift the water to the level of the lake. And the lake receives it.
That was the situation the laborer at the bottom of the trench in 1900 was working to bring about. He stood in the water that had to be removed. He dug the path for the pipe that would remove it. He never saw the system complete.
He never appeared at the opening of a pumping station. He appears in no photograph. He exists in the payroll record of the contractor who employed him, if that record survived, in whatever form it survived, wherever it is kept. The Wood screw pumps run.
The streets above the trench where he worked are dry. The water that was always in the ground beneath them is in the lake. That man is in the past.
