Did Mardi Gras Beads Contribute (Slightly) To New Orleans Flooding?

Workers remove discarded Mardi Gras beads that had been
clogging a catch basin in New Orleans. Photo by Max
Becherer/New Orleans Advocate 

Mardi Gras is fast approaching and the city of New Orleans is in full party mode. The festivities obviously include all those strings of beads that are being thrown around at parade after parade.

Everything has a dark side and those beads have a small dark side. They contributed, at least in a small way, to a damaging flood in New Orleans last August.

Ten inches of rain doused the low-lying city in early August 2017, which as you would imagine caused that destructive flood. It turns out the flooding was made worse by a drainage system that hadn't been adequately maintained in years.

This prompted an emergency cleaning program of the city's catch basins, which turned out were clogged with debris. This allowed water to accumulate in the torrential downpours more than it otherwise would have.

Workers removed 7.2 million pounds of debris from the catch basins, says The New Orleans Advocate. An admittedly small part of that debris problem was the Mardi Gras beads. About 93.000 pounds of the beads were removed from the catch basins during the cleanup.

Going forward, New Orleans will clean more catch basins annually than in previous years, to keep up with the debris removal. In and near the French Quarter, where most of the Mardi Gras festivities take place, clean up crews will sweep litter after parties and parades to the middle of the street for pickup and disposal.

They used to sweep the debris to the sides of the streets, making it more likely Mardi Gras beads could fall into catch basins.

Other cities, even here in Burlington, Vermont also have Mardi Gras celebrations. (Burlington holds their Mardi Gras celebration on March 10 this year.) Time to check the catch basins in those towns?