Brig. Gen. Robert Crear facing unprecedented challenges in leading Corps of Engineers’ effort to ‘unwater’ New Orleans

Two weeks into relief efforts, it’s clear to Brig. Gen. Robert Crear – who dealt with oilfield fires after the Iraq invasion – his mission today has no precedent.

“They don’t even have anything to compare it to,” Crear said while touring coastal wreckage and an inundated New Orleans left by Hurricane Katrina.

Crear, a native of Vicksburg, is also based here as commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Mississippi Valley Division.

Corps teams could imagine such damage, but seeing it really happen and engineering a way out, he said, will be a monumental task.

The immediate focus for Crear and the Corps is to “unwater” the New Orleans metro area, whose flood-protection system was breached in at least two places by wind-driven water from Lake Pontchartrain on Aug. 30.

The levees and floodwalls that were designed to protect the city and its suburbs are administered mostly by parish or local authorities. Officials of those authorities and citizens of those areas were attempting to handle the tasks they could on their own.

The Corps, its contractors and others began working immediately to close the gaps, dropping oversize sandbags from helicopters and adding fill using bulldozers and backhoes. The next step has been then to get temporary and permanent pumps in operation. The effort is being commanded by Crear and his staff of the division’s other top military officers from a flotilla tied off at Port Allen, La., across from downtown Baton Rouge, La.

As of Friday the Corps estimate of how long it would take to unwater the city was 24 to 40 days, down from initial estimates of 36 to 80 days.

Crear said he had been inspired by the progress already made. “It’s an unprecedented partnership,” Crear said.

The Corps is a mainly civilian organization with military officers at the top and accomplishes much of its work through contractors.

Most of the people working for the contractors the Corps was employing to repair the breaks lived in New Orleans and had also had their homes damaged or destroyed, Crear said.

“Since they were local, there was a personal interest, a sense of urgency,” Crear said.

Those contractors include the New Orleans companies Boh Brothers, Bertucci, Dean Equipment and LL&G. They were among those who had used sandbags weighing up to 2,000 pounds each, stone and sheet pilings to seal the breach to the city’s 17th Street Canal and were working to do the same at a larger breach, at the London Avenue Canal.

Vicksburg-based Fordice Construction was also working for the Corps from its St. Francisville, La., office, filling and hauling sandbags and providing hardware such as steel slings, shackles and webbing for the helicopters that were moving the sandbags into place, said Dan Fordice.

A scenario approaching that of the damage Katrina did had been rehearsed by engineers, and Crear, who was at division headquarters in Vicksburg when the storm hit, was in charge of putting it into action.

“We started to execute the plan and then our lights went off,” Crear said.

Crear ordered the relocation of the division’s headquarters and placed Cols. Charles Smithers of the Memphis District and Anthony Vesay of the Vicksburg District in charge of establishing recovery field offices in Louisiana and Mississippi, respectively. Crear also brought in other top Corps military officers, including Col. James Rowan, commander of the Vicksburg-based Engineer Research and Development Center and Col. Duane Gapinski of the Rock Island District, to command staff operations and the unwatering task force, respectively.

Long days have started with Crear’s 6 a.m. conference call in a room with his staff of about 15 to 20 officers. Near the end of one meeting he encouraged his staff with examples of inspirational performance he had seen in the field.

“In spite of the obstacles, get it done – and that’s what I’m seeing every day,” he said.

He closed the meeting by reminding all officers under his command to emphasize safety, integrity and taking care of their people.

Crear, 51, holds the highest military rank of any Vicksburg native since Civil War times. He graduated from Vicksburg’s Rosa A. Temple High School and from Jackson State University in 1975. There, he earned his Army commission through an ROTC program.

The Corps’ work in the recovery from Katrina is being done under the control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its tasks include not only unwatering New Orleans but also removing debris and providing ice, water, emergency power, temporary shelter and roof repair.

As of a week ago the Corps had been authorized by FEMA to do $2.5 billion in work in Louisiana and Mississippi. That’s more than half the Corps’ entire civil works budget and more than three-and-a-half times that of MVD’s budget for 2005.

Crear’s predecessor as MVD commander Gen. Don Riley, now the Corps’ chief of civil works based in Washington, D.C., was also at the MVD’s Port Allen headquarters and was representing the Corps on a joint task force to coordinate with FEMA.

“That gives us an opportunity to keep working,” Crear said of Riley’s service in that role, adding that it allowed Crear to spend time in the field, talking with parish and local officials.

Crear’s Blackberry, a device for receiving e-mails and phone calls and messages, began to make a high-pitched, humming noise. A junior officer at the emergency-operations center said it probably “got confused” with the about 937 messages it had received and had to be reset.

“What I’m trying to do is get the ground truth,” Crear said of his visits. While cell-phone communications had been restored to the Vicksburg area by then, they were still mostly out along the Louisiana coast, limiting the ability of those in the parishes – including local officials and Corps liaisons to them – to communicate.

“Just because you don’t hear from somebody doesn’t mean everything’s OK,” Crear said.

Back on the Mississippi toward the end of his workday, around 11 p.m., Crear commented on the “indomitable spirit” he had seen among officials of the affected parishes that day.

“There’s no way you’re going to keep them from rising again,” Crear said of the local leaders he had met.

Before being assigned the MVD, Crear, also a past commander of the Vicksburg District of the Corps, was in Dallas. Before that, in 2003, he assembled and commanded Task Force Restore Iraqi Oil, extinguishing well fires and then working to restore the oil production and exports.

Crear said the two missions were similar in one way – the time.

“Every day is a Monday – you don’t know what day it is – and every Monday has 20 hours in it,” he said.

In another way, the mission is different.

“What we’re doing now is – it’s personal,” Crear said. “It’s our own country. Failure is not an option.”