How New Orleans Plans for Resilient, Smart Future

New Orleans was always famous for its music, cuisine, architecture and festivals like Mardi Gras. But in 2005, it also became known for Hurricane Katrina. which devastated and marked the city. The weather event left over 1800 deaths and $100 billion in damage in its path. It affected and destroyed a lot of the city's infrastructure, so the administration prioritized rebuilding and repairing it when the federal funds came in, but, for obvious reasons, making the infrastructure smart didn't come then as an urgency and digitalization was limited to the development of resident and community engagement apps. It was essentially or initially around recovery of our city. So in 2005, after Katrina, our federal dollars started to come to New Orleans around 2007, 2008. But we did not have many of our residents back home to recover and rebuild the city at that time. So it was a real push to get data to understand who needed to come back, how we got them back, and how we restored and rebuilt our properties. So I want to say ten years ago, our smart city strategy was really focused around data. Our local tech communities did a lot of work to develop applications. In the beginning, not much could be done regarding smart city projects, as there was no money for it. But they started with changes that would help them make the city work more efficiently and save money. So those that brought a clear return on investment. We are 10 to 15 years out of that cycle now. So in the last five years, our smart city strategy is changing and we're looking more to building a sustainable infrastructure infrastructure in our ground, waste, water management systems, air quality systems, so many of the threats that other cities see. They started with their streetlights, changing 75% of them to LED thanks to a federal stimulus of $14.7 million, a project with a clear ROI. But one of the first real smart city projects with connected sensors was deployed to address one of their biggest challenges, floods. New Orleans is prone to floods as the city is surrounded by water. So once the infrastructure was partly rebuilt and after facing yet another extreme event with the 2017 floods, that became a focus. Water is a big threat to us, so rising floodwaters really cause the city to act in emergency ways more often than other cities. So hurricanes, 72 hour preparation and lead time before hurricanes strike the city is one of the biggest challenges, and I think the one we spend the most time preparing for and mitigating. Water sensors help us understand the rising flood levels and then warn our residents. So whether it's closing a bridge or a gate that does help us, it helps us to measure the water runoff. And then we are also deploying strategies around water runoff and water reservoirs in the city so that the water doesn't accumulate in our high traffic areas. The metropolis deployed in 2019, a flood monitoring and warning system consisting of water level sensors as well as weather stations and roadway warning signs at 12 underpasses. The initiative had a cost of some $650,000 and was paid for by funding received after the 2017 flood event. The sensors will detect the water when it's rising and activate beacons on each side to indicate the closure of the road. Until then, police had had to personally be at each location to do that. But with the project, the process is automatic, saving resources and crucial time. The solution, provided by High Sierra Electronics, also sends real-time data on wind, rainfall and temperature to departments like the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans and the National Weather Service. To date, despite having a team of 15 people in charge of data management and development of various software applications, there is still no specific budget allocated for the purchase and deployment of smart city solutions in the Big Easy, and the municipality hasn't been able to scale smart city projects so far, remaining in the pilot phase or at a small scale. Another challenge the city faces is regarding its broadband infrastructure, which is essential for IoT connectivity and the deployment of smart solutions. Broadband is a big challenge for us and our smart city efforts, as I mentioned, can't really happen without the infrastructure. Many projects assume cities have more infrastructure than they do. I've had several vendors come in and be surprised that we aren't farther along with our infrastructure. In 2021, the city was looking to boost its connectivity and smart solutions through their Smart City project with consortium Smart+Connected NOLA, led by companies like Qualcomm, Jacobs Engineering and JLC. The project was set to bring new wifi equipment to 10 recreation centres for 3 million dollars plus 300,000 for yearly maintenance, test solutions in smart lighting, smart traffic flood monitoring and public information kiosks as well as encourage partners to set up a home wifi system with a cap of 30$ a month and develop a 100-mile institutional fibre network with an estimated cost of $30 million they would have used for their smart solutions and paid for through leasing it to third parties. Unfortunately, that project was brought to a halt on suspicion of bid-rigging in the RFP process, so they went back to the drawing board. We need to work more closely with our economic development partners, our chamber teams, to show that, bringing other and new solutions and bringing people into the community really can help us. And we I think there's a lot of work that we could do in that space together that we just haven't tapped into. There have been some innovation districts in the city, but we need a lot of infrastructure to support them. So fundamental for us is building the infrastructure. Could even be something as simple as making sure that gig speed internet service is available throughout that area or throughout the city. And we're just not there yet. New Orleans’ experience demonstrates once again the importance of having operational civil and telecom infrastructures to enable smart solution deployments at scale with a return on investment. The city understood that there can't be an efficient, smart solution if the infrastructure isn't there, so they're focusing on making sure the infrastructure is deployed before they can invest heavily in smart city projects. They are also betting on educating the public on the importance of connectivity infrastructure through citizen engagement programs like the slow internet challenge.