The Superdome could be ready for the 2006 season, but will the Saints want to play there? They're playing hardball with state and local officials so that's up in the air. Count on the Saints ownership playing hardball to get additional concessions.
Because of the Superdome’s condition, the Saints are playing this season’s games at Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium and San Antonio’s Alamodome, where officials are negotiating with Saints owner Tom Benson to relocate the team. Saints spokesman Greg Bensel had no comment on the possibility that the Superdome might be ready by next October.And the cost for all the repairs? At least $125 million.
“We are working to make the Dome available for next (Saints football) season,” Thornton said. “It is important we get these buildings back up and running as quickly as possible. . .for the city of New Orleans.”
He said in addition to the Saints and Tulane, the Dome is important for the New Orleans Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, the Bayou Classic and the Essence Music Festival.
Workers are trying to get the Arena ready for the last three games of New Orleans Hornets’ season, now scheduled for the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge, Thornton said.
Thornton told the displaced Superdome Commission, meeting at the Louisiana Retirement System Building in Baton Rouge, that contractors should be finished placing a temporary roof on the Superdome in the next seven to 10 days.
Environmental consultants should be finished removing mold and about 1.8 million square feet of wet carpeting and sheetrock in the Dome by Dec. 1, he said. The stadium also will be checked for other possible health hazards caused by rotting food and sewerage back-up as a result of the storm and evacuees.
Meanwhile, power is not being restored fast enough for some. Who can blame them. Even if residents can find an electrician to make sure that the power is dried out and safe, there are insufficient municipal inspectors to check the work, and only then will the utilities turn the power back on.
Larry Chan, the city's chief electricity inspector, said that after the storm, private-sector electricians could make repairs to a building without filing a permit application at City Hall in advance of doing the work. Instead, the electrician could do the work and then contact a city inspector directly to schedule an on-site meeting. At the meeting, the application would be "filed," the work would be inspected, fees would be paid and, hopefully, a permit would be issued.So what did the City do? They went back to the old way of doing things? Go figure. That whiplash effect sure has a way of spreading.
In theory, it would speed up the process. But several electricians said it slowed things down. The problem came when they tried to make appointments with an inspector. Some spent days trying to reach the busy inspectors by telephone.
Electricians with personal relationships with inspectors, and access to their home and wireless phone numbers, seemed to have better luck lining up appointments, several electricians said.
But with so many out-of-town electricians in the city, the system bogged down. Electricians were told they could make appointments with city code enforcers by telephone before inspectors left their City Hall office at 8 a.m. or after they returned after 5 p.m. But more often than not, electricians had to call repeatedly to try to catch an inspector between phone calls.
Because there weren't enough employees in the department to answer phones, the inspectors became their own receptionists and schedulers. That added days to some power-restoration jobs.
And not in a good way.
Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; hurricane rita; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.
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