Picking up the Pieces

The guidelines addressed potable water, electricity, sewerage, the structural integrity of facilities and equipment, maintaining safe food temperatures, pest control and employees.

One particular sector LSU’s Bankston, Bell and Farr worked with federal officials was New Orleans meat, poultry and seafood processors.

About 19 plants in the area, they say, had to shutdown. Of those, 13 are still not operational. One facility lost 53 million pounds of chicken, while another lost 11 million pounds of shrimp. While they presume that some facilities may be in the process of relocating, many of these are simply locked out by Hurricane Katrina’s lasting grip.

The LSU Food Science Department was actually charged with looking for plants that were not in use in other areas in an effort to get processors pummeled by the hurricane back in action.

“On the seafood side, there are a number of those, but they were all in the areas affected by Rita,” says Bankston. “In some ways, you can divide the impact. Some were flooded. Some were impacted primarily by loss of electricity and the difficulty getting in because of flooding.”

“Some had wind damage, lost ceilings, leakage, and there were processing areas that needed repair,” Farr adds.

Bankston says there were a number of small processors in the greater New Orleans area, and a lot of the customers of these small processors were restaurants in the New Orleans area.

“Some of the restaurants were not only being hit with rebuilding a facility, but also rebuilding their labor force and dealing with a customer base that’s not what it used to be,” he says.

One particular market that took a huge hit from the hurricanes and is expected to take some time to recover is exportation.

“We had a big exportation port here in New Orleans,” Farr says. “We had a lot of these frozen storage facilities. Everything that was in there was lost,” he says, adding that stock in these facilities came from five different states.”

To get back in business, however, many of these operations had to get potable water, first and foremost.

According to the CFSAN guidelines, if no potable municipal water supply, non-community public water system or private well water is available to food establishments, potable water should be brought in (tanks, bottled water, “water buffalos,” etc.) for food preparation, cooking, utensil, food contact surfaces and hand washing.

“A small food establishment with three employees uses about 500 gallons of water a day; a major clean-up effort could use twice as much water,” the agency indicates.

While some establishments did, in fact, bring in potable water under the supervision of state and federal officials, others waited on a backlogged list for water analysis, and that took several days to ensure water met Environmental Protection Agency standards.

“In some ways, the restaurant arena is coming back decently,” says Bankston. “In fact, some of those restaurants were opened up before they had potable water through the city system.”

After the evacuation of New Orleans, many found refuge in Baton Rouge, and Bankston, Bell and Farr say that is now Louisiana’s largest city.

“The restaurant trade here is doing well,” Farr says.

“The difficulty is finding the employees to handle the number of people wanting service,” Bankston adds.

Grocery stores, too, seem to be bouncing back, but not to where they way they were before the hurricane.

“You may not have the choices you used to have, particularly in areas that have become more populated,” Bankston says. “Part of the reason is the stuff is off the shelves before they can restock it, but it’s not necessarily because of a shortage. There are some local brands that are hard to find, too.”