The Damage Detectives

A small team of researchers combs an emergency zone for clues: What will
survive next time?  By Martha Baer

You can’t blame Jerry for being curious. It’s not often a guy finds a refrigerator in a tree. Poking around with his tape measure out, Jerry is trying to understand what combination of events tossed this appliance 20 feet up into the branches and left it there. He’s perplexed about some other things, too. There are clumps of grass high up in nearby branches, for example, and another refrigerator further on. And everywhere he looks in the lightly wooded area, trees have been broken off, not from their roots or near their stumps, but midway up, cracked open and exposing the bright, white inner flesh of their timbers. These aren’t trees pulled up from the ground. They are snapped, their top halves hanging upside down from the splinters of the broken trunk. Why, he wonders, are they all fractured at the same high spot?

PHOTO COURTESY JEROME O'CONNOR, MCEER

How does a boat end up on a road?

       Back in the car, Paul has a theory about the refrigerator. “It could have been the wind, Jerry,” he says. “Why not?” Refrigerators are light, he argues, “almost like a Styrofoam chest,” and the empty-box shape offers a pocket of space for the wind’s forces to gather. Paul never fails to append his friend’s name to the end of clauses, as in, “Don’t you think so, Jerry?” or “I’m getting hungry, Jerry.” Now he adds, “It could be, Jerry.”

       “Maybe.” This is a typical answer. Contemplative, measured, Jerry O’Connor is not loose with words. He’s a trim guy—delicate but athletic, along the lines of Bobby Kennedy—whose sun-burned face is only occasionally disturbed by the deep laugh-lines around a broad smile. His rimless glasses and slightly rumpled clothes smack of professor—but he’s not in fact a professor. Like his close friend of 40 years, Paul McAnany, Jerry’s a civil engineer, born and raised in upstate New York, where, he contends, the hard-working Irish built the Erie Canal and then educated their descendents to climb up the ranks of design and construction. Both the sons of civil engineers, the boyhood companions were briefly separated when Jerry went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Paul to the University of Buffalo, but they both returned to the small town of their youth, Hornell, home of the region’s Department of Transportation and of the two girls they married. Today, Jerry and Paul have children of their own who do civil engineering.

       The question about how the refrigerator got in the trees—whether it was wind, waves, storm surge, or some combination thereof—is one of the pair’s concerns for the day. The other is bridges. Paul and Jerry have been sent to the Gulf Coast immediately after Hurricane Katrina by Jerry’s employer, the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering, to study the bridges that did and didn’t survive the storm. (Despite the reference to quakes in its name, MCEER studies many types of disasters.) So at the Fort Pike

PHOTO COURTESY JEROME O'CONNOR, MCEER

Two out of three: Teams will identify what allowed one bridge to remain intact.

Bridge, which spans a portion of the watery opening to the Mississippi River, not far from the refrigerators, Jerry kneels down to get a good look at the structure’s concrete sides. The weather is smoldering, with only the tiniest breeze, which smells like a combination of horse stable and rotting fish.

       “Can you get some coordinates right here?” Jerry says to Paul.

       “What’s ‘here,’ Jerry?” They are out on the bridge now, seemingly nowhere in particular. Stretching out ahead are the double yellow lines of the road and four arched trusses—webs of bluish-grey steel that cut the clear sky into dozens of polygons. When the bridge is working, its center portion, the “turntable,” can swing 90 degrees to allow marine traffic through. Out to the right is Lake Ponchartrain, to the left Lake Borgne.

       “Here—lots of debris piled up on the sides.” Jerry leans out over the guard rail to point. Beneath the roadway, caught in the metalwork that holds up the bridge, are clots of grasses and mud. Jerry is interested in this debris, how it got here and how the forces that brought it affected the bridge he’s standing on. He wants Paul to take a reading from a neat little electronic device, the size of a Nokia phone, that will tell him the debris’ latitude and longitude.

       Jerry begins to jog. Once a long-distance runner, he’s heading briskly toward the midpoint of the bridge. He’s counting spans, he explains, panting. Spans are the lengths of deck from tower to tower or pile to pile. He’s up to 25.

       Back in the car, the two men are surrounded by gear: Jerry’s laptop, running off the cigarette lighter socket via a 400 watt power converter; a cooler full of Gatorade; hard hats; power bars; a yellow light that can sit on the roof and flash; cameras; orange vests; a compass. The Fort Pike Bridge, they decide, did well. (Engineers often talk about how structures “perform” as if they were schoolchildren: “How did Ben do today?”) And that fits a pattern they’re seeing, that continuous bridges do better than more modular ones in hurricane conditions. Continuous bridges are made with horizontal units that extend beyond a single pier or substructure element, unlike simply supported bridge spans that have joints or gaps over each support. “If nothing else,” Paul explains, “waves have to move a bigger piece of material.” As he drives them on, toward their next

PHOTO COURTESY JEROME O'CONNOR, MCEER

Researchers visit dozens of ordinary bridges to look for failures.

bridge, he adds, “That one was partially continuous, which is unusual, Jerry.”

       Two weeks after the southern United States’ most destructive storm on record, and nearly a week since Jerry and Paul arrived, the two engineers are hardly alone in the area. The scene of the Katrina disaster, from the Alabama border to the streets of New Orleans, is swarming with people. Most of them are emergency workers or military personnel, and nearly every vehicle on the roads, aside from the humvees, has some sort of signage on its doors. If it weren’t for the invention of the sheet magnet—the heavy, plastic-coated material that serves so well for making temporary printed signs—the traffic would be anonymous. “Allstate National Catastrophe Team,” says one magnet, stuck on a pick-up truck’s door. “Southern Baptist Convention Emergency Response Team.” “FAA Disaster Response.” And Jerry and Paul’s: “MCEER, NSF Hurricane Emergency Response.”

       Yet some of these vehicles are filled not with rescue teams or insurance appraisers rushing to help put Louisiana back together again. Some of them carry teams of people, like Jerry and Paul, who are interested in quite the opposite. Like one van sporting the magnet that reads “Texas Tech University Wind Research Team,” these vehicles carry researchers, folks whose job is not to restore but to record. Many of them are trained social scientists and others engineers. Their task: to take a snapshot—using audio recorders and notepads, tape measures, chemical test kits, and cameras—of the storm’s immediate effects. Making their best attempts to avoid distracting Red Cross workers or the National Guard, they weave in and out among the early responders as quickly as they can to capture a scene in chaotic flux.

       The work these engineers do at the emergency scene is called “post-disaster reconnaissance” or simply “reconnaissance,” and the work of the social scientists is referred to as “quick response research.” These professionals hale mostly from universities or professional groups, but sometimes from private companies. The plywood industry, for instance, sent two engineers to the aftermath of Katrina. The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, often coordinating with MCEER, runs a tightly organized program that has sent groups, typically of eight scientists, to earthquakes all over the globe as well as to other disasters, like the great tsunami of 2004 and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Their teams include geotechnical and structural engineers, geologists and geophysicists, experts in fluid mechanics, winds, flooding, tides, and human behavior, depending on the nature of the disaster. And a thriving

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