Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Drain Cleaning New Orleans: The Rule That Comes Before the Call
Most utilities ask you to describe the problem. The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans asks you to expose a piece of your own pipework first, and it says so twice on the same form, once in the text and once in a box you have to click to dismiss.
The wording is specific. The six inch sewer house connection cleanout must be open and accessible for the board's team to verify the issue and create a work order. Not to fix it. To create the record that the work exists.
Read plainly, that is a precondition on the utility's own response, and it sits on a thing most households have never located. The board evidently knows this, because it publishes a House Connections department whose stated job is to give you the measurements to find yours.
Our national drain cleaning guide covers what clears a blockage, because that is the same craft in every city. What follows is the New Orleans part, taken from what the board publishes about its own drains.
This city does not drain downhill, and that changes what a blocked drain is
Almost everywhere else, a clogged street drain is an inconvenience because water finds another way down. New Orleans has no reliable down. Water has to be lifted out, which makes the drainage network a machine rather than a slope.
The board publishes the size of that machine, and the numbers are worth reading slowly. More than 76,000 catch basins, which are the grated inlets at the kerb. Roughly 200 miles of lateral drainage lines carrying water from individual street blocks. About 1,810 miles of drainage mains forming the backbone. And 65 miles of open canals taking pumped water away toward Lake Pontchartrain.
Everything in that chain is one system, and the board says so in its own vocabulary: catch basins feed laterals, laterals feed mains, mains feed pumping stations, pumping stations feed canals. A blocked basin is not the end of a branch. It is the first stage of a queue.
That is why New Orleans households ask a question that barely exists elsewhere. When water backs up during rain, is this my line or the street's, and who has to move first. The rest of this page is about how the board answers that.
The board publishes its own maintenance figures, which almost nobody does
Across this project we keep finding authorities that publish no clock, no response time and no productivity figure of any kind. The Sewerage and Water Board goes the other way, and it is the most striking thing about the drainage side of this city.
Its storm drain cleaning page carries a live counter. For the 2024 to 2025 season it reports 14,597 catch basins cleaned, 240.4 miles of drainage lines cleaned and 14,683,220 pounds of debris removed. The current year runs alongside it, and contractor crews and in-house crews are counted separately before being totalled.
There is also a map. You can search a street and see which catch basins and drainage lines have been cleaned or are scheduled, which turns an abstract programme into a question you can answer about your own block in about a minute.
A second dashboard does the same for repairs. The board publishes open work orders across the city, refreshed weekly, with the work order number, the date, the problem description and the average number of days to repair. It calls that transparency and, measured against the rest of this tier, that is exactly what it is.
Where a drain problem actually goes, and it is not all one place
The board runs three services that most cities split between two or three organisations: drinking water, sanitary sewerage, and the city's drainage. That sounds simpler and it is not, because the reporting routes diverge at the exact moment you need them.
A water leak or a sewer problem goes to the board, and the number is answered at any hour on any day. An account question goes to the same digits on weekdays between eight and six. The board prints both side by side rather than leaving you to guess which promise applies, which is a small courtesy and a rare one.
Drainage is different again. The board's own report an issue page separates flooding and clogged or damaged catch basins into their own category, and adds that you can also call 311. So a street drainage problem can leave the utility entirely and enter the city's general service line.
One admission on the parent page is worth carrying here, because it frames everything above. The board states that it can respond only to the most critical emergency situations and tells households to contact a plumber as soon as possible. That is candour rather than a failing, and it is the reason a private clearance is usually the first move rather than the last.
If the board damaged something, the claim is a documents exercise
Drainage and sewer work does damage things. Kerbs, driveways, vehicles, occasionally the inside of a house. The board publishes a claims route for that, and the striking feature is what it asks for before anything else happens.
To open a claim you must supply a full colour copy of a driving licence or state photo identification, front and back, a completed two page claim form, colour photographs or video with a timestamp preferred, proof of insurance covering the relevant category, and three repair estimates on company letterhead. If the repair is already done, a paid receipt replaces the estimates.
Then the clocks. All requested documentation must reach the claims office within five months of the claim being submitted, and the board warns that missing that deadline may result in the claim not opening or being denied. Once everything is verified and accepted, processing may take ninety days or longer.
The board is also careful to separate the claim from the emergency. It says in terms that if the location needs immediate attention you should submit a service request instead, through the field problem form. Those are two different queues and confusing them costs time you may not have.
Set that beside Wichita in Kansas, which we looked at in the same week. Wichita publishes, in advance and by name, the list of failures it has decided are not its responsibility. New Orleans publishes no such list and instead sets a documentary bar. One city gates a claim on law and the other gates it on paperwork, and a household meets a completely different obstacle in each.
The board's own list of things that go wrong here
The field problem form carries a dropdown, and that dropdown is the most honest local guide to New Orleans drainage on the internet, because it is the list of complaints the board has decided are common enough to pre-name.
Alongside the ordinary entries for a water leak, a sewer leak and low water pressure sit several that only make sense in a city built around open drainage. Foreign material in a drainage canal, listed as oil, paint or debris. Foreign material in a storm drain, listed as oil, paint or concrete. A fish kill in a canal. A missing manhole cover, and separately a missing meter box cover.
Two more entries are quietly useful. Odour has its own line, which matters because a sewer smell with no visible water is exactly the symptom households sit on for weeks. And barricades appear twice, once for a barricade that is needed and once for a barricade that was left behind after work finished.
Clogged catch basins are not on that list at all. They have a separate route, which is the board telling you plainly that street drainage and house drainage are different queues.
For the house side of that split, the ordinary craft applies. A blockage in a branch or a main goes to drain cleaning, a collapsed or displaced run goes to sewer line repair, and a line coated along its length rather than blocked at a point goes to hydro jetting. Commercial premises with interceptors are their own subject and sit on our commercial plumbing page.
The money pages, opened on purpose, and the one that surprised us
We open a utility's rates and fees pages before forming any view of a city, because that is where the mechanisms hide rather than the prices. The board's paid out twice, and neither payout is a number.
The first is the water service charge, which the board sets by connection size and bills for as long as a meter is installed, explicitly whether or not any water is used. It calls this the Ready to Serve charge and explains the reasoning openly: it has to stand ready to deliver whenever a meter exists. City trash and recycling charges also ride on the same bill where a household uses those services.
The second is more unusual. Since September 2024, following a City Council ordinance and new state law, every billing dispute, investigation and hearing has gone to an outside firm rather than to the board. That firm has its own contact route and also staffs a representative inside the board's customer service department on weekdays.
We have now seen four different answers to the same customer sentence across this project. McKinney answers it in prose on its own page. The WSSC district convenes an internal panel. Des Moines sells independent arbitration to other utilities. New Orleans had arbitration imposed on it by law. Same question, four completely different places to stand.
What the board publishes that we are deliberately not rebuilding
On the day we read these pages the board was carrying two live precautionary boil water advisories, one for a lakefront neighbourhood and one for the entire West Bank, the second caused by contractor damage to a water main. Each notice explains its own trigger, which is water pressure falling below a stated threshold.
We are not reproducing any of that. Live water safety instructions belong on the page of the authority issuing them, read at the moment you need them, not copied onto a contractor page and left to age. The board publishes its advisories prominently and that is where they should be read.
The board also owns the plumbing code here, along with a grease trap and interceptor regime, and enforces both through two separate departments. That whole body already sits on our New Orleans city page, and the grease question in general is a single subject on this site that lives on our grease management page.
Two more subjects are rationed elsewhere rather than repeated here. Root intrusion is covered on our root intrusion page, and what should never go down a drain in the first place is covered on our flushables page. The board's own advice on both is sound and we have simply not restated it.
Blanks were looked for rather than assumed. We found no published household smoke testing material and no published guidance on impostor callers anywhere on the board's site. Those absences are recorded as absences.
What we do differently on a New Orleans call
The first thing we ask about is not the blockage. It is the cleanout, because everything the board will or will not do downstream depends on whether that fitting can be found and opened. If it is buried under a slab or a flower bed, that is the job before the job.
The second is timing relative to rain. A line that backs up only during heavy rain is telling a different story from one that backs up on a dry Tuesday, and in a pumped city that distinction points at completely different causes and completely different owners of the problem.
We write down what we found and when, in language you can hand straight to the board or to its claims office without translating it. On a route that asks for timestamped photographs and three estimates on letterhead, notes taken on the day are not an administrative nicety.
And we will tell you when the answer is not us. A clogged catch basin in the street is the board's or the city's, and there is a published route for it. Paying a private firm to clear public infrastructure is not something we are willing to let a customer do by accident.
For the ordinary domestic problems that never reach any of this, our guides do the job. Try clearing a drain without chemicals before anything harsher, check a running toilet if the noise is constant, and read the signs of a hidden leak if the bill moved before the symptom did. If water is moving right now, our emergency plumbing page is the one you want.
Where in New Orleans we work
We cover Orleans Parish and the immediate suburbs, and the useful way to think about coverage here is by drainage rather than by neighbourhood name. Which basin your street drains into, and which pumping station serves it, tells you more about how your block behaves in rain than any district boundary does.
In practice that means the older high ground near the river behaves differently from the reclaimed low ground toward the lake, and both behave differently again from the East. The board's drainage system map and its flood tracker are the best free tools for working out which one you are on.
Addresses outside the parish line are a genuinely different regime. The parent page covers why, and it matters more here than in most metro areas: the New Orleans city page sets out where the board's rules stop and someone else's begin.
Statewide context sits on our Louisiana page, and every market we cover is listed in the full location index.
New Orleans Drain Cleaning Questions
Eight questions this city answers differently from most, taken from what the Sewerage and Water Board actually publishes.
Because its own field problem form makes that a condition of creating a work order. The wording is that the six inch sewer house connection cleanout must be open and accessible for the board’s team to verify the issue and create a work order, and the form repeats it as a box you have to acknowledge before submitting. If you cannot find yours, the board runs a House Connections department whose published job is to give you the measurements.
No. Street drainage is the board’s, and it publishes a separate reporting route for exactly that, distinct from the water and sewer route. Its report an issue page also tells you that you can call 311 instead. There is no version of this where a household should be paying a private contractor to clear a public catch basin, and we will say so if you ask us to.
The board publishes one telephone number with two different promises attached, printed side by side. For reporting water leaks, sewer leaks and field problems it is answered at any hour, any day. For account questions it is weekdays only, from eight in the morning to six in the evening. The board also states plainly that it can respond only to the most critical emergency situations, which is why your plumber is usually the first call.
The board publishes a storm drain cleaning dashboard with running totals for catch basins cleaned, miles of drainage line cleaned and pounds of debris removed, split between contractor crews and in-house crews, and a searchable map showing which basins and lines have been done or are scheduled. A second map publishes open work orders across the city with the average number of days to repair. Both are free and neither requires an account.
A great deal, and it is worth gathering before you start. The published list is colour identification front and back, a completed two page claim form, colour photographs or video with a timestamp preferred, proof of the relevant insurance, and three repair estimates on company letterhead, or a paid receipt if the work is already done. Everything must arrive within five months of the claim being submitted, and processing may take ninety days or longer after that.
In a city that pumps rather than drains, it usually points somewhere different from a blockage that happens on a dry day. Rain-only symptoms tend to involve the interaction between your line and a system that is temporarily full, which is a different diagnosis and sometimes a different owner. Tell whoever attends when it happens and when it does not, because that single fact narrows the search more than anything else you can offer.
Because the water service charge is set by your connection size and billed for as long as a meter is installed, whether or not any water is used. The board calls it the Ready to Serve charge and explains that it covers the cost of standing ready. If you think a bill is wrong, note that since September 2024 all billing disputes, investigations and hearings go to an outside firm rather than to the board itself, under a City Council ordinance.
Yes. The Sewerage and Water Board serves Orleans Parish, and the parish line matters more here than most municipal boundaries because the board owns the plumbing code as well as the pipes. Neighbouring parishes have different authorities and different rules. Everything here comes from Sewerage and Water Board publications read on 9 August 2026.
Find the cleanout, clear the line, keep the record
In a city where the utility will not open a work order until a fitting on your property is exposed, the fastest route through a blocked drain usually starts with somebody who knows where to look. Tell us the cross streets and whether it happens in the rain.
How this page was built, and what it deliberately leaves out
Everything above comes from pages published by the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, read on 9 August 2026: Stormwater and Drainage, Storm Drain Cleaning, Report An Issue, the field problem form, Claims, the Work Order Dashboard, Wastewater and FloodTracker. The board's crawl policy was read before any page was fetched and it reserves nothing.
One thing is missing from this page for a reason worth stating. The city government website could not be read, and the cause is a server configuration problem rather than any decision about who may read it: the site serves an incomplete certificate chain, so an ordinary client cannot verify it. We took nothing from that host. Everything above therefore comes from the utility, which owns the drainage system in any case.
Subjects are rationed on purpose so that no page on this site restates another. Backflow prevention, fats and oils, root intrusion, the stormwater fee as a commercial billing question, pools, flushable products, buried utility locating, smoke testing, impostor callers and cost questions each have a page of their own: see backflow, grease management, root intrusion, stormwater fees, pool leaks, what not to flush, utility locating, smoke testing, impostor callers and costs. The argument that an accessible cleanout changes what a job costs belongs to our national drain cleaning page and is not repeated here.
No water rate, sewer rate, service charge, quantity charge or sanitation figure is reproduced anywhere on this page, and no live water safety instruction is copied from the board. Comparisons described above as ours are ours, including the reading of this city against Wichita and Des Moines. Published programmes, ordinances and figures change, so confirm the current position with the board before relying on anything here. Talk to us if a drain is backing up now, or browse every Louisiana area we cover and the full location index.