Between the curry, the BBQ jerk chicken and the chickpea flatbread wraps known as doubles, the Mid-City restaurant Queen Trini Lisa, brings tastes of Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost islands of the Caribbean, to New Orleans, the northernmost port of the Caribbean.
Today, the restaurant is also better able to cope with some of the hazards tropical life and provide neighbors with a dose of critical assistance in the aftermath of the next severe storm.
The back street restaurant is now equipped with a solar panel array and a state-of-the-art battery storage system. That means Queen Trini Lisa will be able to keep refrigerators and ice machine working and electrical outlets available the next time the neighborhood loses power.
Queen Trini Lisa is the first example of a new program that’s out to make New Orleans neighborhood restaurants into independent nodes for community support in crisis times.
After Hurricane Ida, some of the first grassroots disaster response in New Orleans came through just these types of restaurants.
They became spontaneous hubs of support, cooking for neighbors, giving away perishable inventory, simply offering a plug to charge a phone by generator.
A new initiative called Get Lit Stay Lit is out to show the potential of such places being better equipped from the start.
The initiative has raised money for a for the first few projects, mostly from community donations; more are in the works.
A network of such restaurants with their own power off the grid could make their neighborhoods that much more resilient.
In other words, they’d be better prepared to do what many restaurants did on the fly after Ida.
Solar systems and the batteries needed to store their energy are not cheap. But neither are the emergency response efforts after disasters. What if more of that money went to helping the people already in their neighborhoods provide for their neighborhoods in a crisis? Ida showed they can. Better preparation could make that spark go a lot farther.
