Katrina: The Corps of Engineers' response
By U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
August 29, 2006
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Aug. 29, 2006) – Employees of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who are involved in disaster operations have never welcomed the experience of something called the “storm of the century.”
But by the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 27, it was clear that most members of the Mississippi Valley Division crisis-response teams would be experiencing just such an event.
From the division operations center in Vicksburg, Miss., the response plan that had been rehearsed and executed numerous times was kicked into action from Corps district offices up and down the Mississippi Valley. And from on board the motor vessel Mississippi, the Corps’ huge flagship vessel, the “fight” to deal with Hurricane Katrina’s wrath began.
Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, Mississippi Valley Division commander, was on board the vessel and began conducting preparatory operations from there. As a native Mississippian from Vicksburg, he understood what a huge storm in the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf coast could do. He had conducted a recent hurricane-preparedness exercise with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so the plan appeared solid and executable.
Even with a trained meteorologist on the staff, the one thing that couldn’t be predicted was the severity and track of the storm.
Through the weekend the six district offices — including St. Paul, Minn.; Rock Island, Ill.; St. Louis, Mo.; Memphis, Tenn.; and the two districts to be most impacted, Vicksburg and New Orleans, La. — began to execute their plans.
After determining the projected path of the storm, the New Orleans District crisis-team members were moved up to the Vicksburg District to set up emergency operations.
Like so many people living along the Gulf Coast, engineers not involved in the actual fight were told to get out of harm’s way. That meant the New Orleans District, which normally has approximately 1,200 employees managing the Corps’ projects throughout Louisiana, went from a full-up operational district to about 100 crisis-team members, who would eventually find themselves in a fight to save their beloved city.
And while the Vicksburg District personnel began hosting their neighbors from the southernmost district, they also began making preparations to secure Corps assets in their territory and plan their response to the storm that would eventually cause massive damage up to 150 miles inland.
Some critical decisions were made as it became clear that this was no ordinary storm. First, Mississippi was docked at the Port of Vicksburg. She would be the floating command center for the MVD fight in Louisiana and Mississippi. The quarter boats used by the Vicksburg, Memphis and St. Louis districts to house personnel during dredging operations would be rerouted south to house hundreds of Corps personnel. Once the level of the disaster was known, those employees would join the other federal responders.
The Corps districts in the middle of the fight, Vicksburg and New Orleans, began to execute their pre-declaration missions under the National Response Plan. It was a challenge to get those emergency-support functions in place, so that services could be provided to the people who remained in flood-ravaged areas.
The respective emergency-operations centers began issuing tasking orders, alerting primary-response team members for movement, and scheduling FEMA’s requirements for Corps support.
On the other side of the district, the Vicksburg battle staff prepared for Katrina. Like the folks from New Orleans, they wondered whether friends, family, other loved ones, and the homes they grew up in or would eventually retire to would be left standing in the morning.
Katrina moved north throughout the day, and spirits for a better-than expected outcome moved south. Orders continued throughout the day, as Crear brought his battle staff together and issued new guidance as the situation changed.
Then Katrina hit.
Gulfport, Miss.
“It was like being surrounded by locomotives,” said Spec. Richard Pack, who had a ringside seat for Hurricane Katrina. He weathered it in a shelter just two blocks from the shore in Gulfport — one of the areas hardest hit by the storm.
Pack and his squad of Army engineers watched Katrina move in.
Outside the shelter, Katrina struck full force. When the storm passed, the engineers stepped out into the street and saw a different landscape. The high winds and storm surge left widespread destruction. Debris filled the streets. Houses were leveled. Trees were ripped up by the roots, or snapped in half. A gigantic floating casino was lifted up and dropped on the shore a block away from downtown.
“I was in the Gulf War,” Pack said, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The Soldiers immediately went to work, and their first priority was saving lives. “The first few days we did search and rescue, going house to house,” Pack said.
“One woman had stayed in her home during the last hurricane and had no problem, so she decided to take her chances and stay again,” he said. “When the storm hit, water started pouring into her house, so she sat on the kitchen counter. As the water kept going up, her refrigerator started floating, so she held onto it. The water was about a foot from the ceiling when it stopped rising.”
The reception the engineers received was the same at each house. “They were glad to see us coming,” Pack said.
More than a week after the storm, Pack and his squad were still at work in Glenport, Miss., clearing debris from the streets.
New Orleans, La.
As the first wave of the storm passed, it looked like New Orleans had escaped the worst of it. But Katrina was a Category 4 storm — and the levees were only built to withstand a Category 3.
The day after Katrina passed, the levees were breached in several places, and water began to fill the city. For the members of the New Orleans Crisis-Response Team, their worst nightmare had become reality.
The job facing the Corps employees was two-fold. The levee breaches would have to be closed, and then floodwaters could be pumped out of the city.
Mission manager Mike Zumstein was among the Corps employees heavily involved in the pumping operation. The New Orleans District mechanical engineer’s home was just a few blocks from the 700-foot breach in the 17th Street Canal levee.
Zumstein said he and his wife, Debora, grabbed a few personal items and their two cats and headed north for Memphis at 2 a.m. Sunday before Katrina’s Monday landfall.
Zumstein and a cadre of other displaced people assembled in the Memphis District’s emergency-operations center and began developing plans for pumping out the water.
A few days later they moved south to Baton Rouge, La., and then to New Orleans, operating out of one of the Corps’ deployable tactical-operations centers.
Slow and painful as it may have seemed, the “dewatering” team began making progress.
Attacking Breaches
Nonstop convoys of 20-ton trucks delivered sand, gravel and large rocks to areas on the 17th Street Canal, where access roads had to be built to the breach there. The road was then forked from that location and built to reach the London Avenue Canal breach. Crews then turned their attention to building a road to a second breach area at Mirabeau Road. In mid-September Corps contractors were building about 500 feet of roadway per day.
The next step at the 17th Street Canal, and later the London Avenue Canal, was to cut off flow from Lake Pontchartrain into the canal. Corps contractors drove 150 feet of steel piling across the canal to seal it.
Meanwhile, Texas Army National Guard Chinook and Black Hawk helicopter crews placed an average of 600 7,000-pound sandbags each day into the breaches. Depending on the helicopter’s lift capability, Corps riggers averaged one to three hookups every two minutes during daylight hours. Sandbagging operations ran 24 hours for 10 days and, with the breaches complete, were halted Sept. 10. Several crane barges were also used to place sandbags and gravel, and other barges were used to haul equipment, pumps, generators and people to sites.
“We did everything we could do to bring in the right equipment, materials and resources to expedite these breach closures,” said Col. Richard P. Wagenaar, New Orleans District commander.
“I’m proud of these people. They’ve lost a lot, some of them are without homes themselves, but they’re putting their hearts into this mission and exceeding my expectations,” he said. “I can’t say enough about their dedication and determination.”
Shift in Mission Focus
Though the mission of repairing pumping stations and ordering and placing auxiliary pumps was an ongoing operation, on Sept. 8 it became the primary focus. Wagenaar’s goal all along was to have pumping operations begin as soon as the breaches were closed. And they did. Draining began at the 17th Street Canal site Sept. 5 and at the London Canal location Sept. 10.
The Corps concentrated its portable pumps and generators at canal locations to support the ongoing draining by pumps in the southern areas of the water basins. As the canals leading to the pump stations cleared, the Corps, contractors and local water board authorities were beginning to repair the pumps that were under water or otherwise crippled by Hurricane Katrina. The local power company was also working with authorities to provide electricity to specific pump-station grids. As canal waters receded and more power was restored, more pump stations became operational.
In the New Orleans area 148 pumps needed repair. By Sept. 10 some 26 pumps were pumping 9,125 cubic feet per second, and 39 portable pumps were pumping 723 cubic feet per second. In addition, nine of 26 existing pumps in Plaquemines Parish were operating at 1,360 cubic feet per second.
Aftermath
Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the military was ready to offer its assistance. At Camp Shelby, Miss., Joint Task Force Katrina was set up Aug. 31 as the Department of Defense’s focal point to support FEMA’s relief efforts along the Gulf Coast.
Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, First U.S. Army commander, headed up the task force to coordinate DOD active-duty support for disaster-relief efforts in the hurricane’s aftermath, much of it already under way.
Part of that JTF was Task Force Engineer, headed by Brig. Gen. Bruce Berwick. Its job was to coordinate with FEMA to arrange for shipments of ice and drinking water, restore power and basic utilities, remove debris, clear transportation routes and arrange for temporary housing.
At the Memphis District, District Commander Col. Charles O. Smithers III oversaw those mission areas.
“The numbers are staggering,” Smithers said of the debris-removal effort. “We’re talking about 103 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Leading a force of volunteers from Corps districts as far flung as Portland, Ore.; Buffalo, N.Y., and Wilmington, N.C.; employees spent 12 hours a day in the scorching Louisiana sun, watching hundreds of trucks roll in and out of the debris sites. Employees conducted quality-assurance assessments and kept records of the workers’ efforts.
Temporary roofing — more popularly known as the Blue Roof Program — was also a big focus for the Memphis District.
In this case, volunteers from the Omaha, Kansas City, New Orleans and other districts secured rights of entry from homeowners requesting temporary roofing, then provided quality-assurance services after contractors had installed sturdy plastic sheeting.
After the storm, New Orleans District realty specialist Geanette Kelley temporarily found herself with nowhere to work. Once she learned that her own home had suffered minimal damage, Kelley volunteered to work with rights of entry for temporary roofing. Kelley said she planned to continue working on the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort as long as she was needed.
For Corps employees and volunteers in the stricken Gulf Coast region, that’s the bottom line — to help the storm victims for as long as they need help.
(Editor's Note: This story was first printed in the June issue of Soldiers Magazine. Written by John Rickey, Chuck Minsker, Jim Pogue and Susan Jackson.)
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