Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Hurricane Katrina

Stunned and slammed

Alligators and water moccasins, twisted conveyor belts and devastated workers challenge the Tampa company's effort to rebuild its coal transport facility in Louisiana.

By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published October 30, 2005

	[Photo by Chris Graythen]
	Rod Palmer, head of TECO Bulk Terminal, describes hurricane damage to one of two coal conveyor belts. About 200 feet of the structure was twisted like a pretzel by a 23-foot storm surge and winds of up to 130 mph.

DAVANT, LA. - The day after Hurricane Katrina swamped the TECO Bulk Terminal here south of New Orleans, Rod Palmer, the facility's vice president, flew in by helicopter to assess the damage.

Water lapped at his office building's second-story windows, transforming the terminal's storage yards into lakes interrupted by islands of coal. An 80-foot high dockside crane had been snapped from its foundation and lay crumpled on its side. A towboat and dozens of 250-foot barges were scooped together and stacked like dominoes along the levee.

Then things got worse. Walking along the levee's spine, the only strip of dry land for miles, Palmer spotted an eight-foot gator swimming on his right, in murky water where the terminal's parking lot should have been. The swollen Mississippi was to his left. And a herd of spooked cattle was stampeding in his direction. Palmer, 55, scrambled onto a nearby coal conveyor belt just as the animals thundered by.

"I was in Vietnam," said Palmer, who worked at TECO-owned Tampa Electric Co.'s Big Bend and Gannon power plants before taking over at TECO's Davant facility seven years ago. "But I didn't see anything quite this bad from the bombs."

Since Katrina, Palmer and his employees have become pros at finding their way out of dicey situations as they repair a critical link in the supply of coal to Tampa Electric.

Water moccasins nesting in flooded gear boxes? Kill 'em, then fix the motor.

Gator hiding out in the warehouse? Throw it in the bed of the nearest pickup and set it loose in the lagoon.

Wetland grasses and a dead deer draped over coal piles, eight feet above the ground? Remove the deer; ask the customer if they care about the grass.

Drowned cow dangling from the treetops? Just one more reminder of a world turned upside down by Katrina.

Eight weeks after the devastation, Palmer, silver-haired and outfitted in blue polo shirt, jeans and work boots, tells these tales with a bit of swagger and a wide grin. He and his workers have witnessed the unbelievable. They've been stunned and felt like they've been slammed in their guts. Now they're working 12-hour days on seven-day shifts doing something about it.

A couple of things worked in their favor. Officials of Plaquemines, the parish where the 225-acre terminal is located, opened the levee after the storm, allowing the property to drain in less than a week. And all 155 of the terminal's employees were located within 10 days. Though they had evacuated to points as far-flung as Oklahoma and Illinois, none were injured. However, nearly all were homeless. Those who had homes lost all the contents.

Palmer, who was in Tampa with his wife and two grown kids during the storm, returned to find his home in Slidell still standing. But everything inside had been submerged.

"It looked like the inside of a washing machine with a particularly nasty load," Palmer said.

Within a couple of weeks, Palmer and his boss, Sal Litrico, president of TECO Transport, had the terminal ready to receive workers. Five trailers arrived by boat to serve as barracks for 40 men. A towboat on the river sleeps another 20 and houses the mess hall. Palmer's temporary office is an 8-by 20-foot trailer that Litrico decorated with a "Camp Davant" banner.

"Get five guys in there and everybody knows everybody else's business," Palmer said.

The business at hand is getting the terminal back to full operation as soon as possible. Palmer and three staffers sketched out a recovery plan in a Lake Charles hotel room two days after the storm.

"So far," he said, "we've beaten it by 21/2 days."

Palmer and his team aimed to have one waterlogged conveyor belt up and running by Oct. 15. Though it meant removing hundreds of alligator garfish from the conveyor's underground tunnel and rewiring water-damaged motors, the belt was functional by Oct. 12. It's now being used to transfer coal from barges to oceangoing vessels bound for Tampa Electric's Big Bend and Polk power stations.

Next up: repairing the terminal's second conveyor system, which runs to a 80-foot-high machine that normally stacks and reclaims coal from the storage yard at a rate of 6,000 tons an hour. About 200 feet of the elevated conveyor closest to the stacker was twisted into a helix shape by a storm-driven wall of water 23 feet high and winds that reached 130 mph.

Workers will remove the mangled section and weld in a new piece, then repair the machine's electrical and mechanical damage.

"We'll have it back in operation in three weeks," Palmer said on Oct. 21. "Twenty-four days, to be exact."

There is a missionary fervor to the recovery work. Part of it stems from Palmer's loyalty to the parent company, Tampa's TECO Energy, where he has worked for 21 years. The transfer and storage terminal, the largest of its kind in the Gulf region, is the handling facility for most of the coal and petroleum, or pet, coke used by its sister utility company in Tampa.

(This close relationship has cost the utility. Last year, Florida regulators ordered Tampa Electric to absorb more than $15-million in annual coal transport costs it had planned to pass through to customers. Consumer advocates argued the electric company unfairly favored TECO Transport, which operates the bulk terminal, in the bidding for a coal-transport contract.)

When Katrina struck, Tampa Electric had about a 30 days' supply of coal on hand to power its Big Bend and Polk stations. While the terminal's first conveyor was being rebuilt, coal shipments resumed from a temporary floating crane about 100 miles upriver. Since mid-October, the transfer of coal from barges to Tampa-bound ships has resumed in Davant, albeit at half the normal speed.

Because a mechanism that moves the conveyor belt from one hold to another is still out of commission, a ship must be moved down the dock when each hold reaches capacity. It is a painstaking and time-consuming process, made trickier by strong currents and winds.

"What normally takes 16 hours, now takes 32 hours," said Palmer, watching coal being transferred recently to TECO Transport's 550-foot Pat Cantrell. About 40 barges awaited unloading.

Because it is operating with only one conveyor, the Davant terminal has limited ability to move the 600,000 tons of stored coal and pet coke that successfully survived saturation by Katrina. Nor, with one unloading crane toppled, can the terminal handle many non-TECO customers, who account for about 55 percent of the facility's business.

The terminal's dockside crane, a total loss, will cost about $9-million to replace. TECO Energy has said wind and flood insurance will cover some costs, but not lost business. The company has put third-quarter hurricane costs at $6-million, while total restoration figures are still being assessed.

Both Litrico and Palmer know, however, that dollar losses are just part of the equation.

"The bigger problems are the people issues," said Litrico, who works in Tampa but has visited the terminal several times since the storm. "Unless you've lost everything, you can't really feel it. These people have been traumatized. A lot are questioning whether they even want to be back in that area."

Even before Katrina, Palmer had a closer relationship with his workers than most bosses. Employee turnover has been less than 5 percent at the property and many workers are second-generation. That lineage could well be broken by Katrina.

"Some workers - I'd say 7 or 8 percent - are so devastated, they just can't come back," Palmer said. "People are saying, "This is my history, but my wife and I just can't deal with it.' "

Along Highway 39, the main drag on this narrow spit of land on the east bank of the Mississippi, what were once neighborhoods have been smashed open like pinatas. Houses, floated off their foundations, sit at absurd angles on levees, in the middle of side streets, wrapped around trees. A 50-foot fishing boat, the Lady Camelot, has its nets tangled up in trees. A statue of the Virgin Mary stands on a stoop that's missing its house. Scrawled on a piece of plywood in one scoured yard is this message: "Welcome to hell."

Palmer, driving a white pickup coated with mud, calls the disorienting disarray "our new normal." Seeing oddities like a home washed nearly 2 miles from its foundation has become commonplace.

What really got his attention recently was the sight of a woman walking her two dogs in a nearby field, a rarity in an area that has been largely abandoned. With no power and no gas stations open, homeowners might come back for a visit, but few stay.

"I see wives dropping their husbands off and they just want to get back to some semblance of normalcy," Palmer said. "So we will rebuild. If I have to drag everybody with me, we'll fix it."

Palmer has his own personal driving force. His wife of 32 years is battling cancer. The couple was celebrating completion of her chemo treatments when the hurricane struck. "She is my hero," said Palmer, who has a pink band supporting breast cancer research on his wrist.

Nearly two months after Katrina tore through, the trees in Plaquemines parish are starting to bud with green. There is talk of bringing FEMA trailers or Habitat for Humanity homes to a lot near the terminal, to house both workers and locals. Palmer said he wishes he could move his employees out of their temporary housing and onto a more normal work schedule by Christmas, but he doubts that will happen. His immediate goal, every day, is to move his workers past the initial shock and onto the long road to recovery.

"I had a young guy who came back the first day and just stood and stared at the breaker box," Palmer said. "He said, "Mr. Rod, what are we doing to do?' I told him we're just going to take one step at a time."

Information from Times files was used in this report. Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or 727 892-2996.

[Last modified October 28, 2005, 20:24:02]