Shreveport Considers Back Generators For Traffic Lights

Back in 2001 a major ice storm hit Shreveport knocking out power for days. Traffic lights were also out. Cops were placed at busy intersections to direct traffic. Since then the city has tried to come up with ways to keep this from happening again. The city started by searching products already on the market after the 2001 ice storm. One of the things they first considered were battery operated generators, but city traffic engineer Michael Erlund says that would only keep traffic lights operating for a few hours. "A number of our large scale outages are for a considerable length of time and three or four hours, that just wasn`t going to give the response that we needed." So city traffic engineer Michael Erlund and assistant traffic engineer come up with the idea of using a back up generator that would run on natural gas. Shreveport would be the first city to use this type of back up generator. City traffic engineer Michael Erlund feels other cities might even follow Shreveport`s lead. "I think they`re going to be looking at us as being on the cutting edge of something." The city traffic engineer says the back up generators should be installed after the city works out the contract with Power Up the company that designed the generators.