LUS Annual Comprehensive Engineering Reports

Since 1950, the LUS has contracted consulting engineering firms to assist in developing annual Comprehensive Engineering Reports (CERs). The reports are prepared to meet requirements of bond ordinances and to provide assurance to lending institutions. The level of detail, organization, and format have evolved over the years, but the basic purposes for the report have stayed the same.

According to the 2011 CER, the report's purposes include

• Provide an annual review of the physical operations of the Utilities System and Communications System
• Provide an annual review of financial operation of the Utilities System and Communications System
• Provide a reference document for LUS, which includes historical analysis and data
• Provide recommendations to LUS concerning various aspects of its Utilities System and Communications System

For citizens, these reports provide a source of historic information about our city and utilities system. The reports also document planning and management for near-term future utilities needs.

You can view all the CERs that I have been able to collect by clicking HERE. This collection currently includes all or part of CERs from 1953, 1954, 2008-2011 (partial copies), 2012, and 2015, If more year's reports become available, I will add them to the collection.

LUS does not provide access to current or past CERs through their web site. In my collection, the 1953 and 1954 reports were scanned from copies held at the UL library Louisiana Room. Other copies were provided by Simon Mahan. Optical character recognition (OCR) software was applied all copies. Although some text was not correctly recognized by this software, the OCR text does often allow rapid text search for specific topics within the reports

This photo from the 1953 CER show the LUS steam electric power plant which
began operation in 1951 and provided 91% of electrical power used in 1953..