ABOARD THE M/V MISSISSIPPI – A flotilla that is home to a group of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers personnel called Task Force Hope has been established here across the Mississippi River from downtown Baton Rouge.

The Corps’ Mississippi Valley Division, based in Vicksburg, has established forward operations on this, its flagship vessel, and other support boats for recovery operations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

About 40 people working on the Motor Vessel Mississippi and well over 300 on the flotilla overall make up the task force, said MVD public information officer Charles Camillo.

At least 15 of those, including the MVD commander, Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, and Col. James Rowan, the commander of the Corps’ Vicksburg-based Engineer Research and Development Center, are from Vicksburg, Camillo said.

Among the group’s tasks is to remove floodwater from New Orleans, which was inundated with water after Katrina caused a storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain that overflowed parts of the Corps’ system of levees and floodwalls. The Corps calls the process de-watering.

The storm also knocked out power to much of the city. Pumps that were in place to drain the city when necessary had not been able to operate until Monday night, Camillo said.

“We got the first one up and running last night,” Camillo said, adding that that achievement was just one in a series in which people working here have been able to take pride.

The Corps is responsible on its own for flood-control, flood-fighting and other activities related to navigation of the nation’s waterways.

In addition to those responsibilities the Corps is working in support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Teams from the Corps, which has about 34,000 employees who are mainly civilians, are to provide emergency-support functions such as removing debris and providing Katrina victims with ice, water, emergency power, temporary shelter and roof repairs.

On Tuesday, a Corps team completed work on its first temporary-roofing project in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie La., said public-information officer Jim Pogue of the Corps’ Memphis District.

“Every time there’s a new ‘first,’ there’s a boost in morale,” Camillo said.

All but about eight of the Corps’ 1,300 or so New Orleans District personnel evacuated their base in the city and are working in Vicksburg, here and in Memphis, said Pogue. Plans called for Memphis-based staff to handle the de-watering of New Orleans and that plan is being followed, he added.

New Orleans District personnel are also working on that task but many of them have lost their homes and their work is being supplemented by those based in Memphis, Pogue added.

The Motor Vessel Mississippi was on a low-water inspection trip on the Atchafalaya River in southern Louisiana when Katrina was first spotted as a danger while off the Florida coast. It was moved here from Vicksburg on Aug. 30 and the other boats that make up the flotilla had arrived by Thursday, Camillo said.

The flotilla also includes three boats that have served as quarters for employees of the Corps’ Mat-Sinking Unit. That unit was working near Tunica when its work was interrupted by the need for those boats here.

The boats are acting as a staging area for Corps employees who are to provide emergency relief in the hardest-hit areas around New Orleans.

Corps relief teams headed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast were being processed through the Vicksburg District offices. That district’s commander, Col. Anthony Vesay, has been assigned to establish a Gulfport recovery field office that Corps officials have said could require about 1,000 employees.

Two factors that contributed to the decision to locate MVD’s forward headquarters here, about 90 miles upriver from New Orleans, were that Louisiana’s emergency-management office is in Baton Rouge and that it was one of the southernmost cities where operations could be established with the least duress, Pogue said.

Rowan said ERDC personnel and technologies were making significant contributions to the task force.

Among the capabilities ERDC was using was special radar to rapidly gather information from the air that can be used to model underwater terrain and to evaluate levees.

The ERDC’s Topographic Engineering Center, based in Northern Virginia, was developing a model that would track and predict the de-watering of New Orleans, Rowan said. The model will help leaders at all levels see the system and will help others plan such missions as debris-removal and reconnection of homes to utilities such as natural gas and cable television.

ERDC’s Waterways Experiment Station site in Vicksburg was also providing space for more than 200 employees of the New Orleans District, Rowan said.

“The ERDC role is significant now as it always is and it is going to be significant in the future,” Rowan said, adding that such matters as levee designs and the qualities of water, soil and the Louisiana coast as a whole would be studied anew.

“The Environmental Lab will play a huge role,” Rowan said, referring to one of the ERDC’s four labs that is based in Vicksburg. The other two ERDC labs are based in Champaign, Ill., and Hanover, N.H.