By KEVIN CHIRI
Editor and Publisher

LAPLACE – As Hurricane Gustav approached Southeast Louisiana on Sunday from the Gulf Coast, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued another of his growing list of quotable quotes.

“This is the mother of all storms,” Nagin said to the public during a news conference.

Fortunately for Louisiana, and particularly the River Region, Gustav did not turn out to be “the mother of all storms,” as it hit the area on Monday, and had less of an impact here than Hurricane Katrina, which plowed through Louisiana almost three years to the day.

However Gustav has left plenty of problems behind, and officials in St. John Parish are advising residents here to be patient with the recovery task—mainly in terms of waiting for power to be restored to the 17,000 homes in the parish.

After Monday’s landfall of Gustav, coming onto Louisiana soil south of Houma and heading northwest towards Baton Rouge and Lafayette, the River Region is again faced this week with recovering from another hurricane.

This time, St. John Parish President Bill Hubbard said on Tuesday, the region was spared a direct hit and will face plenty of inconveniences for several days, but nothing near the devastating effects that were left behind by Katrina.

“I feel pretty good about what happened to us, in terms of not having really serious effects,” Hubbard told L’Observateur Tuesday, between his steady road trips as he personally kept checking on the recovery process.

However, Entergy Customer Service Representative Sheila Butler said that with the loss of power to the entire parish, it will take another “day or two” before even knowing how long power will be out. She declined to specify a timetable for return of service.

Butler said her teams are currently assessing the damage, but have a heavy loss of transmission lines and substations to deal with, along with the massive outages throughout the homes and businesses in the region.

As for the parish assessing what happened from Gustav, and getting to work to restore things to normal, Hubbard said that things were progressing well heading into the middle of the week.

“I think we were as prepared as we could be for this storm, and now we are moving very quickly getting things done,” he said. “But I am advising residents who have left to not come back until Saturday, if they are hoping to have power restored to their homes.”

Hubbard said that Entergy was going to have a priority list for electricity with River Parishes Hospital topping the list, followed by the nursing homes locally, then Highway 51 where local hotels were. From there, businesses would take priority since they need to be up and running so the rest of the parish can get the support they need in terms

(See GUSTAV, pg. 3A)

of products to clean up.

Hubbard said that he believes the advance preparation by St. John helped keep a number of homes from being flooded, since he ordered 11 portable pumps brought in to service notoriously low-lying areas.

“No doubt the extra pumps we brought in saved some houses, especially in Old Riverlands, Foxwood, LaPlace Park and some other areas,” he said.

Public Information Officer Buddy Boe said that he and Hubbard personally spent Monday, the day of Gustav’s arrival, running in and out from the parish office to make sure the pumps were working and to check on them.

“We would wait until a band got through, then Bill wanted to run out and check the pumps again,” Boe said. “You could tell he wanted to do everything he could to get people through this OK.”

Before the storm hit, St. John also had a challenge in that a new federal government regulation had put the responsibility for moving special needs citizens out of harm’s way.

“We had to run a public transportation system for the first time in the history of St. John Parish,” Boe said. “But we moved about 850 people out of here and I think we did it well.”

One serious problem from the storm emerged on Za Montz Road where a sewer pump burned up just before the storm hit.

“We had 4,000 to 5,000 people who are serviced by that sewer system who suddenly didn’t have service,” Boe explained. “We were out there working on putting a new pump in on Tuesday, but it didn’t help them before that. But this was just one of those things that went bad on its own and we did the best we could with it.”

Overall, Hubbard said that the biggest problem left by Gustav was the large number of downed trees, which naturally pulled down power lines with them.

The parish has already contracted with two companies to manage the cleanup after the storm, with Beck Disaster Services and DRC hired to assess and direct debris cleanup, as well as make rounds throughout the parish to pick up the trees and debris that are put on the side of the road.

“We hope residents will start getting stuff out in the next day or so since these companies will begin picking it up that quickly,” Hubbard noted. “But we will make many rounds to be sure we get it all and residents will have plenty of time to still get their yards cleaned up.”

All in all, Hubbard said he felt like the parish did a good job being prepared for the storm, and is quickly going to rebound.

“I have to admit that I was pretty nervous about this storm as we watched it come closer,” he said. “But we were fortunate not to get hit too hard, and now I think my construction company experience is helping us to get things done very quickly.”