What working in Harvey is actually like
Harvey is the one place we work where a residential suburb and a working industrial waterway sit on top of each other. The Harvey Canal runs the length of the community, connecting the Mississippi through the Harvey Lock to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, and the corridor along it is marine services, fabrication yards, barge and offshore support. That gives Harvey a three-phase, motor-circuit and equipment-load workload out of all proportion to its population, and it sits a few streets from ordinary slab houses that need a receptacle replaced. Both are ordinary work here.
The canal also changes what fails. Equipment along a brackish waterway corrodes on a different schedule from equipment inland: disconnects, weatherheads, meter cans, exterior junction boxes and motor terminations all oxidize faster where damp air comes off the water. Corroded terminations are resistive terminations, and a resistive termination carrying a motor load gets hot. On the industrial side we thermal-check terminations under load rather than inspecting them by eye, because the outside of an enclosure tells you almost nothing.
Residentially, Harvey is postwar Westbank: predominantly slab-on-grade subdivisions built from the 1950s through the 1970s, with Woodmere adding a large 1970s and 1980s tranche on the Lapalco side. That puts a great deal of Harvey housing inside the 1965 to 1975 aluminum branch wiring window, and slab construction means rewiring runs higher per square foot than the same job on a raised frame house in Gretna, because every run has to be fished from the attic or surface-routed. Drainage matters too: the streets that hold water in a hard rain are the ones where we find corroded splices in low junction boxes and damp under-slab conduit.
