ENR and Army Corps Often Meet in Aftermath of Disasters

This week’s cowl story on the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers’ mission to scrub up devastating injury sustained by Los Angeles County in the course of the Eaton and Palisades fires this 12 months continues a protracted historical past of reporting on company actions. That features Corps work to remodel the Mississippi River into a serious transport channel and, because the late 1800s, to regulate its flooding, in addition to navy building to assist troops in two world wars and in different international incursions and to deploy an emergency removing of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore final 12 months.

Whereas best-known for flood management, inland waterway and environmental safety work, Corps post-disaster efforts are what ENR reporters typically discover themselves masking—this week the Los Angeles fires reported by Editor-in-Chief Scott Blair (see story, p.22). “The Corps has a various position within the navy and past,” he notes. “Within the final 10 years that I’ve been within the area masking disasters, it has been the go-to entity FEMA makes use of to scrub up and handle a lot restoration and rebuilding work.” Different devastating disasters are Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017 and Hurricane Harvey flood injury in Houston the identical 12 months.

This 12 months marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating flooding of New Orleans and injury to the Gulf Coast. Since that disaster, the Corps carried out the New Orleans Hurricane & Storm Injury Threat Discount System, a $14.5-billion program accomplished in 2018 that has helped considerably scale back flood threat to town and area and stands for example to different cities (see Viewpoint, p. 68).

Within the aftermath of the California fires, the U.S. Environmental Safety Company and FEMA carried out environmental hazard cleanup, which took a couple of month, and contracted the Corps to take cost of the remainder of the cleanup effort, together with hiring business contractors along side county and native authorities officers.

In his experiences with the Corps, Blair says he was typically impressed with administration talent and dedication of its staff members, particularly as deployments that usually lasted as little as one month have been accomplished with seamless transitions and glorious communication. “As an establishment,” he concludes, “the Corps stays distinctive.”