Sewerage & Water Board Drainage Station 6 — Wood Screw Pumps

Albert Baldwin Wood graduated from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in 1899 and was hired that same year by the Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans to try to improve the drainage of a flood-prone city. The problem was baked into the ground itself: New Orleans had been founded on a natural levee at a sharp bend in the Mississippi, chosen for strategic control of the river and access to Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John, but the land had no slope, no outlet, no way for rainwater to leave except by evaporation or force. Wood invented the Wood Screw Pump in 1913. The pumps installed at Drainage Station 6 have been in continuous operation since that year—among the oldest continuously operating pumping machines in the United States. They move water uphill and over the natural levee into Lake Pontchartrain fast enough to drain the city after heavy rain. Some of Wood's pumps have run for over eighty years without need of repairs. New ones continue to be built from his designs. Wood invented flapgates and other hydraulic devices, including the Wood Trash Pump in 1915. He spearheaded swampland reclamation and development of much of the land now occupied by the city. He designed drainage, pumping, and sewage systems for Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore, San Francisco, and cities in Canada, Egypt, China, and India. His work was especially helpful in the Zuiderzee Works, which reclaimed large areas of land from the Zuider Zee in the Netherlands. The station is not regularly open to the public but is occasionally included in architecture and engineering tours. You stand in front of machines that made the modern footprint of this city possible—the device that turned swamp into neighborhood, that allowed New Orleans to expand beyond the sliver of natural high ground into land that would otherwise flood with every storm.