Lakewood – When a woman stranded on the roof of a flooded Louisiana high school went into labor the night of Sept. 1, it was a federal geologist who directed the rescue boat to her.
When a rescue team from Phoenix arrived in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina with axes and guns but no boat, it was a U.S. Geological Survey researcher who piloted them from house to house in a federal speedboat.
“We got 250 people out of there in U.S. Geological Survey boats,” Greg Smith said Tuesday in a seminar at the agency’s regional office in the Denver Federal Center.
“What we normally study: wetlands and amphibians,” said Smith, who directs the agency’s National Wetlands Research Center in Lafayette, La.
Scientists from the agency and the Bureau of Reclamation on Tuesday detailed the work they did in response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the work that remains to be done.
Some of that work was humanitarian and some scientific.
Federal employees piloted rescue boats, produced flood maps and helped emergency operators locate people stranded on rooftops.
They also are doing research, such as comparing before-and-after aerial photographs to understand how massive storms reshape coastal landscapes and how disasters release contamination.
Vials of dark muck and bottles of water from the Gulf Coast sit on federal shelves in Lakewood, awaiting analysis for bacteria, petrochemicals and other contaminants.
“We’re trying to understand the fate of this material, how it’s processed in the environment,” said Geoff Plumlee, a geologist in the federal agency’s Lakewood office.
Smith and about 35 of his workers spent days after Katrina sleeping on artificial turf in the training center for the New Orleans Saints football team, he said.
Their most valuable skills: boating and mapping, Smith said.
Some geologists camped out at the emergency- operations center in Baton Rouge, La., where thousands of 911 calls were coming in every day, he said.
Street addresses were useless because rescue workers unfamiliar with neighborhoods couldn’t find street signs. Even locals lost their way in the floodwaters.
So the federal geologists figured out how to translate street addresses into latitude and longitude, Smith said.
“As fast as they were coming off the printer, helicopter pilots were grabbing them,” he said.
Some Denver geologists are poring over sophisticated aerial images shot in the days after Katrina, trying to find hot spots of contamination from the air, said Eric Livo, a research geologist in Denver.
“We still don’t know if this will work,” Livo said, “but it would be great if it does.”
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
