Planned sewage pumping station bemuses White Oak Landing residents

White Oak Landing residents are concerned their neighborhood’s idyllic entrance at Woodlake Drive, off of South Harrell’s Ferry Road—which splits two lakes—is going to be ruined by a massive elevated sewage pumping station to be built just off the roadway this summer. “If you think of a Gulf drilling platform, that’s what it looks like,” says Gehl Davis, president of the White Oak Landing Civic Association. The city-parish Department of Public Works says the pumping station must be elevated to prepare against a 100-year flood event and must be built on the site of the current—and overloaded—station because the sewerage system in the neighborhood is gravity-fed to that point. “Now if we put a pump station elsewhere, it would be built in addition to this pump,” says DPW interim Director David Guillory, noting the station pumps sewage out of the neighborhood to the main system located across Jones Creek. “We didn’t just arbitrarily pick this location.” Guillory says the new station will have triple the capacity of the current station. White Oak Landing has had its share of backed-up sewage into homes and overflows at manhole covers into lakes during big rain events, Davis concedes, but he’s nonetheless concerned about the station’s effect on White Oak Landing’s aesthetic appeal. “There’s no possible way to hide that with vegetation,” he says of the pumping station, noting it will be elevated 10 feet off the ground. Guillory says it will have vegetation planted around it, but access points will still have to be available for DPW workers. —Adam Pearson