What the Corps of Engineers is doing here

Recovery Field Office Redefines ‘Rapid Response”

Diverse team pulls together in crisis



They said you had to see it to believe it, but the men and women about to become the Recovery Field Office (RFO) did better than that—they saw it coming. Jack Hurdle, Chief of Operations at the Memphis District, was a veteran of at least 20 major disasters, and both his experience and his gut told him Katrina might indeed be a ’hundred-year storm,’ unrivaled by any hurricane in living memory, and unparalleled in its destructive force and the danger it posed to the City of New Orleans. A few days before Katrina made landfall, government personnel from USACE, FEMA, EPA, the Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and even a contingent of retired federal employees—an assembly of disaster specialists—prepared to move toward southeastern Louisiana, in the direction of a storm whose extraordinary power would only be fully understood later, by its survivors.

Leading the RFO was Colonel Charles Smithers, Memphis District Commander, also a veteran who understood how much every minute counted in a recovery effort of this kind. The team’s goal in Baton Rouge was ‘Boots on the ground.” They were ready, once the hurricane blasted past, to confront the devastation, and by dint of engineering know-how, and more than a half-century of collective experience fighting disasters, to outmaneuver the catastrophes we euphemistically call the “aftermath” of a storm.

In this case, however, after Katrina + Rita punched into the city of New Orleans and hammered its way across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, euphemisms like ‘aftermath’ were quickly replaced by less equivocal language—for many observers, ‘wasteland’ seemed to sum it up.

In the city of New Orleans, immediately after Katrina hit, Colonel Richard Wagenaar rallied a separate core group that set out on a parallel course. Operating out of the District Office -- sleeping on cots, and surviving on bottled water and MREs -- his team struggled to diagnose the injuries to the hurricane protection system. Damage to the levees, floodwalls, gates, and pumps posed the immediate threat, but those challenges and the floodwater inundating the city were not the only dangers. Peril lay under the water as well – biohazards, toxins, leaking gas lines, live wires, and the always-present threat to human life from any combination of the above. There were people camping out on the roofs of houses, waving to rescuers from upper-story windows. Thousands of displaced Americans were still landlocked in the Superdome, and the last of them would not be out until January of the following year.

The Recovery Field Office (RFO) in Baton Rouge, under its FEMA mandate, immediately fell into step under Task Force Hope, an organizational entity designed by the Corps as a means of tackling immediate, and often large-scale, obstacles to recovery. Despite the absence of precedents in a crisis of this magnitude, the team set its course, drawing, in many cases, from experiences elsewhere, in war zones and situations where the devastation might have been less extensive but similar in nature.

Some of the team members, like Donald McClure, had helped achieve engineering miracles during and after Desert Shield. Others were veterans of storms like Andrew and Camille. They knew the kind of courage it takes for a man to dive into water dark and thick enough to make direction disappear, so he can shut off a leaking gas line or clear debris clogging a pump. They trade stories about “just-in-time” rescues – pulling trees as long as semi-trailers off the road minutes before fire trucks roar by on the way to another five-alarmer. They reminisce about challenges and successes barely a year old, and if there is a common theme, it is the one that distinguishes the front-line troops in every struggle from everybody else: the real victory belongs to men and women whose names will never really be known and whose contributions may never be adequately understood.

On July 1, 2006, the Recovery Field Office moved its base of operations from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. By that time, a number of original team members had returned to their own offices in different agencies or to other divisions and districts within USACE. On paper, the RFO mission still looked formidable, despite significant, sometimes unbelievable accomplishments. “When we started,” says Chris Alphonso, a USACE mission manager, “debris was piled as high as buildings . . . we started moving debris four days after Katrina, and 14 months later, we’ve moved 24 million cubic yards, enough to fill the Superdome five times.”

The scale is impressive, but the larger achievement lies in the record time it took for the RFO team to move the debris out of the way of emergency and medical workers focused on saving lives and protecting property. The ‘back-story’ turns on 24/7 shifts, on months of separation from families and loved ones, and on an extraordinary willingness to abandon one’s day-to-day life on a moment’s notice to come to the rescue of strangers.

In the days following the storms, those same strangers also needed water, ice, and emergency power, and the RFO delivered it all, part of both local and national efforts to bring 170 million pounds of ice, and more than 5,500 truckloads of bottled water to hard-hit areas. Working with the 249th Engineer Battalion -- United States Army Prime Power -- the RFO installed 288 emergency generators, in City Hall, the Superdome, and in other critical facilities lacking light, refrigeration, air conditioning, or power to operate emergency equipment.

The roofing team—planners, quality assurance specialists, project managers, and the construction workers who drive the final nails—set records as well. Working at peak performance, RFO roofing teams managed to raise the bar to an all-time high: 1,750 blue roofs in a single day. In March, 2006, they completed their mission after blue roofing a total of 81,218 homes in Louisiana.

Members of the RFO continue to come and go: as the sense of urgency diminishes, home offices are more likely to call their own employees back. In some cases, the threat is diminishing, but in others, the challenges haven’t disappeared—they’re simply changing over time. Mike Patrick is an environmental officer currently assigned to the RFO operating under the auspices of Task Force Hope in New Orleans, and he understands that the environmental ramifications of Katrina and Rita may present challenges for years, even decades. Eddie LeBlanc is one of the youngest members of today’s RFO, and inspired by his grandfather’s career with the survey branch, also chose a career with the Corps. Like Mike Patrick, Eddie believes that much of his future, with the organization, more than twenty years, may center on the problems that Katrina and Rita both created and exposed.

Right now, of course, that future and what it may hold has to take a back seat to ‘Katrina plus 14 months.’ The RFO is still very much in business, and while no one can predict the challenges it may confront in the coming months and years, no one who’s watched this team work doubts its ability to overcome.