NASA v. Katrina: August 29, 2005

Updated, September 7, 2020: That U.S. In is Labor Day Weekend, and although most of us now also call the house “the fee”, the Ars staff are taking long weekends to relax and unwind. August ended 15 years after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, federal levies failed, and the city of New Orleans changed forever. We plan to redesign a few pieces from the archives to keep the lights on this holiday, so we’re turning this look back on how we managed to weather Katrina’s influence at her Michaud Assembly facility outside of New Orleans. The story originally ran in August Gust 2015 and it looks unchanged below.

Michaud, La. Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, federal levies failed, and chaos ensued in the New Orleans metro area.

So far the damage has been well documented. Many were displaced that New Orleans still sits at about 80 percent of its pre-storm population a decade later. After 128૨28 U.S. The hurricane killed at least 1,200 people. And 80 percent of the city was flooded, with the National Hurricane Center estimating an estimated 1 billion in property damage. Almost regardless of the metric, Katrina’s U.S. It also stands as the most destructive Atlantic hurricane to hit.

Yet the day before Katrina, Malcolm Wood had to go to work.

Wood lived in Pique, Mississippi, about an hour away, and luckily the rest of his family got the means and access to go north to Hettisburg for safety. But like most people living in the Mississippi Delta or Southern Louisiana, while working in Greater New Orleans, Wood’s company refused to close on the eve of the storm of the century, despite New Orleans being the first mandatory vacancy. He couldn’t. For starters Billions Before and in the future work was on the line. Wood’s direct co-workers – more than 2,000,000 colleagues – also made a lot of money. Heck, the whole national operation that Wood was probably a part of hanging in the balance, depending on whether its facility, just 15 miles east of the lower 9th Ward, could survive.

So Wood, a huge and capable man, who has already been in the same position for 20-plus years of employment, set out to do the job assigned to him. Faced with direct impact from the 400-mile-long stormfront and 120+-mile winds, he was part of a 38-man team that had to move ahead of Hurricane Katrina. In space To defend the company’s 832 acres of water adjacent facility. Attention? Keep the line as intact as possible.

“We knew from the weather station that it was going to be worse than the previous hurricane,” Wood said. “It sounded like a complete storm” – but the stakes were literally out of this world. So Wood headed down to Little Michaud, Louisiana, about 40 miles down and prepared to spend the night at Building 320. The frustrating office fee space sits at the back. NASA Mitchaud assembly facility, where the organization’s fuel tank has been built since the 1960s.

It will be a straight night of about 30 that Wood and company will spend on Michaud Grounds.

Keep the lights on

As you might expect from its large southeastern U.S. detachment, NASA has plans to remove the storm. Michaud, in particular, had faced 25 to 30 such incidents in his time before Katrina, giving her place. As Wood explained, the ride-out crew is part of the typical pre- and post-storm processes. In their duties, a potential crew travels the facilities to identify potential potential areas for the facilities, binds any material that could prove dangerous, if the site maintains provisions and generators, and ultimately explores anything that comes up. Helps facilitate online return online. If a storm feels bad enough (and Katrina deserves it), the Ride Out crew will also be the only group on site, which will be the last line of defense against the elements. “We’ve had a lot of storms that we’ve come here and gone through, but usually it’s two days, three days and you’re running back,” Wood told Ars. “This was very different.”

Wood claims that some memories are gone after 10 years of the storm, but he can remember a lot from what it felt like the first 24 hours. It started raining overnight on the 28th. It came with such a strong wind, with such a strong wind, that you couldn’t quickly get out of Building 320 and build any of the commonly visible campuses there, including Building 450, one of the farthest south end of the subsequent facilities. Important pump house 17-foot levy. To maintain a sense of calm, Wood remembers just staring at something and going back to hyperferx.

“There’s a little light on the pump house, so by the time I saw that light I knew the pump was running,” Wood said. “I knew they were pumping water to make it rain. We don’t know if we will be flooded or not, but if you stand in front of this building (320), we will see an increase in water here. If he doesn’t take the first step here, we’re fine. “

Initially, some of Wood’s ride-out mates were in the Pumphouse. They monitored whether the caterpillars were pumping inside, four devices capable of handling 62,000 gallons of water per minute, surpassing the rising water and preventing flooding in a manufacturing area a few hundred yards away from Building 320. But NASA’s protocol for security accounts also takes its brave ride out of crew members. Once the wind reaches a certain comfort force, everyone must be brought inside a safe area (in this case, Building 320) and stay on the lockdown until the danger arises. The tipping point during Katrina came at 3 p.m.

“We can’t usually leave the pumphouse, but we had to go and get them back in the middle of the night,” Wood recalls. “So early in the morning two people took a dump truck and it was very obscure – you couldn’t see the road, and it was dark above. For the first time in my years of being here with Katrina, I remembered that we had lost power at the site. I mean the city lost electricity – it’s unique. “

From that point on, Wood believes it was really “touch and go”. Based on past storms, he was confident the Ride Out team would get re-running facilities if only nature gave them a chance. But Katrina’s devastating prospect was painfully evident even at the moment, and the ride-out crew is well aware of this atrocity. This is the year 2005, just two years before the Columbia tragedy, and Michaud was expected to be given back a number of outer tanks as part of his mission to return to space. While everyone knew that the space program would end sometime in the next decade, losing Michaud would dramatically affect that period.

“If we had lost Levi, we would have shut down the NASA space program,” Wood says. “We manufacture every vehicle here, so how do you get into space until you get to New Orleans? It’s the most devastating event you could ever do. If Michaud were completely overwhelmed, NASA would have to say, ‘Well, we’ve just come out of the space business.’ It would have been a loss for years and years. “

Wood was director of facilities at the time, and as he saw, drainage was never an issue. Features’ Drainage system can hold a certain amount of water and if given for a while it eventually flows. But if the pump was left at all when the water was still coming in, that calculation would suddenly tragically go out of balance.

So that night the team had to make a decision. It was possible to change the speed of the pump, but these were water-cooled devices, and pushing them too hard would cause overheating and risk of failure. Eventually, Wood and company chose to push the throttle – which did its job.

“I never thought there would be any danger, but the way it’s raining, you can look at the roads and you know you’re never going to pump it,” says Wood. “Our calculation was about a billion gallons of water, so we always kept the pumps running because you always had some kind of seapage coming back.”

That next morning, the Michaud Ride Out team learned that he had completed his primary task: the facility was not underwater. However, it was mostly the only thing on Old Gentle Road – which was Michaud’s main manufacturing drag – it wasn’t.

Wood says, “We didn’t know until the next morning (8/30) that we were basically an island. “We were surrounded by water. At night and the next morning, we knew there was a lot of rain and wind going on, but you could never imagine you were surrounded by water. We kept our pumps running and did the right things, which we were trained to do. The day after that and the devastating 30 days later, you will see people doing unusual things. “

Image list by Nathan Mattis