Q-C man honored for work after Katrina
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By Mary Louise Speer | Monday, January 30, 2006 |
When Col. Duane Gapinski attended his first day of classes at West Point Military Academy, he never envisioned taking charge of draining a city covered by water.
Last fall, the commander and district engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Rock Island District called on all of his inner resources to oversee the Task Force Unwatering mission in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His team’s role was to find ways to push out the water covering 80 percent of New Orleans after Katrina’s force damaged parts of the city’s levee system.
For his leadership, he was chosen by McGraw Hill’s Engineering News-Record magazine as one of the 25 top newsmakers of 2005.
“He was definitely the right guy for that job,” says Denny Lundberg, of the Corps’ Chief Engineering Division. He served as Gapinski’s civilian deputy and senior program manager during their seven-week odyssey.
“I’m honored. I’m humbled. I had a lot of help and a lot of great folks I was working with,” Gapinski said about the award. “I just happened to be fingered as the guy in charge, but they were the ones working to get things done.”
He arrived in New Orleans on Sept. 7 with Lundberg and a team from the Rock Island District. The Corps’ New Orleans division had a plan for dealing with a hurricane, he said, but not enough manpower to
accomplish the herculean task.
Their first glimpse of the flooded city was sobering even to Lundberg, who experienced a baptism of fire during the Flood of 1993. Major breaks had occurred in the levees along 17th Street and London Avenue drainage canals, and the results darkly resembled Venice, Italy.
The two men looked at each other and asked, “Why did we do this?” Gapinski said of the mission.
“I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into. It was quite an adventure. Until you get up in a helicopter, you can’t see the full extent of the damage,” he said.
The group moved into New Orleans’ Corps headquarters on the Mississippi River and began setting up teams to unwater the city. Their primary mission was to get the water out so “normal” recovery efforts could begin and to deploy resources across the terrain’s five drainage basins, Gapinski said.
Lundberg described the living conditions as rudimentary.
“We slept on the floor. We drank bottled water. We ate MRE’s (meals ready to eat). Access to anywhere was impossible,” he said. On average, their satellite and cell phones worked about half the time.
Lack of power meant the team members faced even tougher challenges trying to analyze exactly where the breaks occurred and solutions to fix the problems. Their weapons were laptop computers and maps that pinpointed their progress in repairing levees and pumps.
“Working and sleeping in the same area was definitely intense. A sense of urgency drove us,” Lundberg said.
“I had it pretty easy because I had an incredibly motivated team who knew what needed to be done,” Gapinski said. “Many of them were from New Orleans, who lost everything. I just made sure we were all working toward a common goal.”
Hurricane Rita tried to mess up their efforts in late September, but the teams kept plowing ahead and saw water levels go down by about half a foot per day.
“Rita set us back a couple of weeks, but we took a lot of actions that ended up mitigating the effects of Rita,” he said.
By Oct. 11, the majority of the water was gone and people could drive around the city.
Gapinski, who became the commander and district engineer of the Corps’ Rock Island District in 2003, served with engineer units in the 9th Infantry Division, 1st Armored Division and 1st Infantry Division. He commanded the 82nd Engineer Battalion from 1998 to 2000 and served as Task Force Falcon Engineer in Kosovo for seven months during that time.
He graduated from West Point in 1982 and has graduate degrees in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and national resource strategy from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
He is president of the Rock Island Post, Society of American Military Engineers and a registered professional engineer in Virginia. He resides with his family in Davenport.
Gapinski will be honored April 6 in New York City, and he is also eligible for the Award of Excellence from the Engineering News-Record. The unwatering experience reinforced his leadership philosophy of talking to people, listening and trusting them, he said.
“I learned that I can only keep working 18-hour days for a month,” he said. “I know more about New Orleans better than any other place I’ve lived.”
The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2245 or newsroom@qctimes.com.
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