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Blue Roof program for damaged Katrina homes ends

By Dona Fair
March 17, 2006

BATON ROUGE, La. (Army News Service, March 17, 2006) – Another chapter in what has become one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history came to a close as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency closed its Blue Roof program for victims of the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

A team of more than 700 engineers and other volunteers from throughout 41 Army Corps of Engineers districts worldwide wrapped up a seven-month mission to provide temporary repairs to both residential and public building roofs damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to Kim Thomas, head of the blue roof operations based in Baton Rouge.

More than 81,000 roofs in Louisiana and more than 152,000 buildings within an 82,000-square-mile area stretching from Texas to Alabama received temporary roofing following the two hurricanes that pounded more than 500 miles of the Gulf Coast region.

“Hurricane Katrina hit the coast on the 29th of August and by the 5th of September we had assessment teams flying over the region to determine the extent of the damage,” explained Thomas. “On the 6th of September we began to set up our ‘blue roof’ operations.”

Working under the FEMA umbrella, Thomas and her crews set up disaster recovery centers at large discount stores and home improvement centers where they issued ‘right of entry’ forms for hurricane victims. The forms gave permission for contractors to place the blue tarps on roofs as an interim measure before actual repairs were made.

Thomas believes that recovery in this region will be slow, but she seems optimistic that the Corps’ involvement has made an impact despite media reports of a slow and insufficient response from the federal government.

“When we see people coming up to us and thanking us for what we do, it makes this job really mean something,” Thomas said. “We wear the Corps of Engineers shirts and can feel proud for the impact that we make on individual lives. We’ve gotten some bad press, but you can’t see it from the faces and the responses we get from those we help. We’re here to do a job, but not because we have to, but because we love to do it.”

Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, who heads the Army Corps of Engineers Mississippi Valley Division in Vicksburg, Miss., said it was just one of many projects the Army Corps of Engineers was involved with in an attempt to help a four-state region get back to a sense of normalcy.

“You have an unprecedented storm with unprecedented destruction, so we have what I call an unprecedented response,” explained Crear. “We have people from 41 out of 45 districts involved and those four not involved are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“You’ll find volunteers from Japan, Korea, Europe, Alaska, Hawaii, as well as the other 48 states – so this has been an unprecedented order of magnitude that has never been witnessed before,” he said.

(Dona Fair serves with Air Force News.)