CHECKING INTO THE HANCOCK HILTON DOES NOT CONSIST OF GIVING YOUR BAGGAGE TO A BELLHOP and presenting a credit card for the room and incidentals. When you check into this hotel, you are assigned a cot in a trailer or tent, and you are given two sheets, a pillow and a blanket.

But it's not all bad. Your laundry is cleaned, your meal may consist of prime rib and shrimp, and someone picks up after you.

The Hancock Hilton was actually the Hancock County Fairgrounds in Mississippi, and it was just one staging area that housed utility workers who restored power after Hurricane Katrina.

“It's like running a hotel,” said Matt Flott, Entergy's staging manager at the Belle Promenade staging area in New Orleans. “There are a lot of people here working long hours to make sure the workers have good meals, and a nice and safe place to sleep and shower.” The Hancock Hilton actually offered two forms of sleeping arrangements. For those who didn't find the tent cities to their liking, they could opt to sleep in mobile sleepers, which would probably not be the first choice for those who are claustrophobic.

No, it's not summer camp, but staging areas served as makeshift cities that provided as many services as possible to linemen who traveled from all over the United States and parts of Canada to help restore power to millions of customers.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst national disasters in U.S. history, so it's understandable how these logistics staging areas housed and fed anywhere from 400 to 2500 workers at a time.

Logistics directors and managers take their jobs seriously in bivouacking line crews. “The linemen do a fantastic job. Our job is to make sure they have a good breakfast, lunch and a good supper — and make sure they get a good night's sleep, and the rest of it they'll take care of: getting the lines up and the power back on,” said Bobby Callaway, staging area manager for Georgia Power. Callaway is ordinarily a working foreman for Savannah Electric (Savannah, Georgia, U.S.), but he managed the Hancock County Fairgrounds site after Hurricane Katrina hit.

SLEEPING QUARTERS

Workers may be housed in hotels, community centers or, as was common for Katrina, tents or sleeping trailers. Entergy, whose headquarters are in New Orleans, housed linemen at a Girl Scout camp, MCI WorldCom's headquarters, the FFA area at Hines City Community College and the Regency Hotel. At the MCI WorldCom headquarters, cots were set up in cubicles and meeting rooms.

Entergy also provided several tent cities. In New Orleans, the Ponchartrain Center housed between 1500 and 2000 workers with the capacity to support 4000 workers if needed. The other centers in New Orleans housed anywhere from 500 to 1500 utility workers.

Southern Company (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.) accommodated approximately 11,000 people at about 20 staging areas.

“Housing/sleeping areas were established by evaluating available locations and contacting owners,” said Bunny Crocker, Entergy technical specialist (nuclear), who worked logistics at the Central and MetroCenter staging areas in Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. “Initially, most areas were without power, but crews attempted to establish power in the areas they slept ASAP. All property owners were accommodating; even private homes were volunteered for use by crews, although to my knowledge, no private homes were used.”

Not all staging areas were tent cities. Some provided only certain services. Types of staging areas included:

• Day staging area

  This is where any of the following are provided: food, fuel, materials, operational managers or equipment parking overnight. Security is provided. This is usually used when hotels and motels are available for sleeping, laundry, etc.

• Materials and lunch pickup only

  No other resources available.

• Fueling and equipment parking only

  Everything else is at another location.

• Sleeping only

  This is usually a community center or church recreation center. All other logistics support is supplied elsewhere.

• Full-blown tent city that has everything

  These usually support large numbers (1000 or more).

• Best case

  This is a hotel or motel that has everything, including enough space to park the equipment.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Providing hot meals for breakfast and dinner and boxed lunches for crews on the job site was one of the main logistics duties to be handled. Melvin Wilson, director of storm logistics for Mississippi Power, a Southern Company, said, “Just think about what it takes to serve 1000 people at one site.”

For Wilson, it started with a caterer providing more than 1000 hot meals for breakfast. Before the crews left for work, 1000 boxed lunches had to be distributed, along with ice, water and drinks. (At some staging areas, logistics personnel delivered lunches to workers in the field.) One thousand bags of laundry had to be handled on a regular basis. Mobile shower units had to be cleaned and serviced regularly. Portable toilets and dumpsters also had to be serviced regularly, Wilson said.

As the crews returned at night, 500 trucks had to be parked in a manner that allowed them to be fueled each night. Providing the diesel fuel and gasoline to power the equipment was a daunting logistical task in itself. It wasn't uncommon for a staging area to receive a shipment of 20,000 gallons in one day.

“Fueling the trucks is an elaborate process,” said Joe Catalanotto, a site manager at Entergy's Ponchartrain Center. “It involves 20 people and is really something to see.”

At the end of the workday, busing of crews from other sites was necessary if parking overflowed at the lodging site. Once again, the caterer had to be prepared to serve enough meals for dinner. A large quantity of soap and towels had to be in place for showers. One thousand cots with linens and pillows had to be cleaned and ready. Security had to be in place around the clock. And nurses had to be available to provide medical attention.

Entergy furnished a medical care trailer staffed by paramedics. The paramedics typically treated several dozen workers a day. Common ailments included heat exhaustion, bee stings, rashes, abrasions, poison ivy and head colds. They also provided tetanus shots on request.

Of course, it took a good number of support personnel to keep staging areas operating. Kathy Brignac, a logistics manager for Entergy's Boomtown staging area, worked with a team of 20 to 25 people who handled logistics for 477 to 600 workers. Normally a meter services supervisor, Brignac's storm duty was managing the logistics for the Boomtown Staging Area located on the south side of the Mississippi River opposite New Orleans. She had been working at Entergy's Bell Promenade service center before coming over to set up the Boomtown facility. Brignac explained, “The startup is always hard, and we work closely with the Entergy Command Center for Louisiana as we address needs that include water, gas, diesel and ice. The Boomtown staging area held up to 600 workers. The on-site breakfasts and dinners were particularly nice, as they were provided by nearby Boomtown Casino staff and served within the Casino grounds. Sleeping arrangements consisted of large air-conditioned tents with cots.”

At Southern Company's Hancock site, which housed about 600 people and fed anywhere from 700 to 1000, 22 logistics workers checked in crews, cleaned facilities, fueled trucks and coordinated other services.

“Due to the large ratio of crew/logistic staff, we divided duties with one person functioning as the lead. For instance, my primary responsibility was ensuring water, drinks and ice were available,” Entergy's Crocker said. “Another person primarily handled laundry, another supplies, another fuel, etc. Naturally, we all crossed into all support areas at various points during the recovery effort.”

Joe Wyse, storm center logistics director for Georgia Power Co., a Southern Company, and chairman of the Southern Company's Logistics Directors Committee, emphasized that all the logistics personnel were volunteers. “They have full-time jobs working as comptrollers, accountants, financial analysts, administrative personnel from the operational business units and corporate business units, nonoperational supervisors and managers, marketing representatives, sales personnel, project managers, timekeepers, secretaries, you name it,” he said.

FOOD FOR HIRE

The caterers, on the other hand, were hired by the utilities before the staging areas were even set up. The Catering Cajun Inc. has built a strong relationship with Southern Company, and it is frequently called on when the company is preparing to work a storm.

“We'll start ordering our food and getting our equipment loaded and ready to go,” said Scott Hayes, president of the Catering Cajun. “We'll track the storms in the Atlantic just like the power companies do, and if we see something getting close, we begin the dialogue to get a sense of what their thoughts are.”

For Hurricane Katrina, the Catering Cajun fed 5000 workers three meals a day. The meals were usually cooked on-site, with the smaller sites being in the 600-person range and the larger sites as large as 2500 people.

“We always try to offer two entrees, and we try to feed them real well,” Hayes said. “Their living and working environment is not always what they would like it to be, so the thing that affects morale the most is good food. We feed them prime rib and shrimp, or chicken and ribs.”

The caterers' job was a 24-hour day. “We start making breakfast about midnight, and then usually have coffee ready for them between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.” They had breakfast ready between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., then started working on dinner somewhere between 9 a. m. and noon. The crews ate dinner between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. The caterers also provided boxed lunches, which were made at a central distribution point and then sent via refrigerated trucks overnight to be available for workers at lunchtime or if the logistics personnel delivered them to the field.

Hayes said that he gained a great deal of satisfaction from being part of the restoration effort. “We work very hard, and we're working on adrenaline. It's quite a rush just helping these guys get the communities back to where they need to be and getting the power on.”

The Cajun Caterer's biggest challenge was communications difficulties. The employees relied on text messaging to send information between operating sites. “Early on, we had to drive an hour away from the staging area just to get on an overpass over the interstate where we knew we could get cellular service,” Hayes said.

Georgia Power did provide them with some Southern LINC radios, which then allowed them to communicate better.

Communications was also a challenge for the power companies. Callaway said that they didn't have cell phone service for a week and a half, and Wilson said that they had never been without communications for so long. The Southern LINC radios worked the best.

Katrina posed other challenges as well. “Before Katrina, we had never had more than 4000 people to lodge and feed. We had never used tent cities before,” said Wilson of Mississippi Power. “We had never been completely without hotel rooms on the Coast. We were forced to evacuate our regular storm center due to flooding and move to another site.” Wilson said that they had put together a worst-case scenario calling for a peak of 5000 crews, and they ended up being double that.

It took longer to get staging areas operational as well, according to Georgia Power's Wyse. “A lot of the resources we had on standby in nearby areas were also disabled and unable to activate,” he said.

Over at Entergy's Metro North Mall service center in Jackson, Mississippi, Bunny Crocker said his group faced several difficulties throughout the course of the restoration effort: “Prescription refills; doctor visits; one person got staph infection from a chainsaw injury; breakdown of trucks and rental vehicles; disorderly crew (only one case); garbage removal; port-a-john service; residents dropping by to determine when their power would be restored; security (locals trying to steal gas from fuel tank, only two cases); obtaining supplies because many businesses (groceries and hardware stores) were closed.”

STEPPING UP TO THE TASK

By far, the most riveting aspect of Hurricane Katrina was the devastation.

Caterer Hayes said that he'd become somewhat “hurricane-hardened” by going into these environments so often, but Hurricane Katrina was by far the worst he'd ever seen. “I wasn't prepared to go somewhere and actually work with people who have totally lost their homes,” Bobby Callaway of Georgia Power said. “I live in Savannah, and I don't know these people, but then when you get to know them, you find out that they've lost everything, and they're working from 5:30 to 11 o'clock at night. I wish I could have done more or been prepared to do something more than I did.”

Even though these utility workers had sustained damage to homes, vehicles and other personal property, they were still just as dedicated to getting the lights back on.

“Crews did a great job,” Crocker said. “They appeared to obtain great satisfaction from the power restoration. Many returned in the evening and relayed stories of sympathy for residents and how appreciative people were to have power restored. All were appreciative of logistical support personnel and realized we were operating under limited conditions.”

Wyse emphasized the dedication of the logistics crews. “They do everything they can possibly do to support our crews during a major event, to make their jobs easier. They endure the same difficult circumstances that our crews do with the exception of the hazards posed by climbing poles and working with energized circuits.”