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 wash up devastating harm sustained by Los Angeles County throughout the Eaton and Palisades fires this yr 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 manage its flooding, in addition to navy building to help troops in two world wars and in different international incursions and to deploy an emergency elimination of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore final yr.

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

This yr marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating flooding of New Orleans and harm to the Gulf Coast. Since that disaster, the Corps applied the New Orleans Hurricane & Storm Harm Danger 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 few month, and contracted the Corps to take cost of the remainder of the cleanup effort, together with hiring business contractors at the side of county and native authorities officers.

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