The St. Charles Parish Council approved a $350,000 contract with Tasch Electric LLC of Norco to correct an electrical grounding problem at the parish’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC), but also wanted to know how the money would be recouped.
Parish attorney David Moyer said once the work is complete and final costs assessed a lawsuit will likely be filed against contractors that handled the job.
“We are very certain that it’s going to end up in litigation,” Moyer said. “We have requested some of the parties to cooperate and pay some of these costs and they have rejected those overtures. This is the option we have left.”
Ron Perry, the parish’s Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness director, agreed.
“We’re going to fix the EOC, find out what the costs of repairing the damages are and sue the parties of interest,” Perry said. He named Duplantis Design Group of Thibodaux, Associated Design Group of Lafayette and Aiges Construction of Laplace as “parties of interest.” Perry said the focus of these concerns is “leaning toward design issues.”The companies could not be reached for comment by publication.
EOC Senior Coordinator Jason Tastet said, after occupying the new building in early February of last year, electrical issues became apparent with power outages by June of this same year.
“We thought it may have been a one-time deal and fixed it,” Tastet said.
Perry said the incident was followed by another problem that rendered the electrical system inoperable. Tastet added the outages were temporary and the EOC remained operational with generators and then power was restored.However, Perry said the outages caused permanent equipment damage.
Tastet said they called in engineers, as well as parish engineers, who assessed the issue and found a grounding problem in the electrical system, which Perry added was found throughout the system. The engineers provided recommendations on correcting the problem, which called for increased steps for the grounding to R56 (Motorola standard).
The original engineers, who designed the system, were called in, he said. They “fixed some of the deficiencies” last year.
According to Perry, the electrical upgrade is “appropriate for a building like ours because of the multiple communications used at the building.”
At this point, he said the work went out for bid and Tasch Electric hired to do the work.
Tastet added, “Our goal here is to have the best functioning EOC to serve the parish. We were given recommendations by the best engineers we could bring in, and are considered experts. We feel confident the EOC will be more reliable and more robust by improving the grounding system. We want this EOC to be bullet proof. The parish expects us to be here to answer that call and that’s what we want to be able to provide them.”
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