Transmission & Distribution World has worked closely with our vendor and contractor sponsors to bring you this special issue that focuses exclusively on the rebuild of the Gulf Coast. Our entire industry kicked into high gear to bring power back to the cities and towns hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We have so many unsung heroes, from the utility workers who were pressed into emergency duty, to the manufacturers whose plants worked over a holiday weekend, to the contractor and utility crews who flooded into the Gulf from all corners of the country.

T&D World Editorial Director Rick Bush spent two weeks reporting on the utilities rebuilding their facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana. Along the way, he photographed the incredible fury that Katrina unleashed. While visiting the areas most devastated by Katrina, he noticed a sense of quiet and calm descends, punctuated only by the occasional sound of a shore bird or the rumble of a solitary service vehicle. The Gulf Coast cities and towns are only now coming to grips with the magnitude of the rebuild required to bring businesses and neighborhoods back.

We begin this special issue with a pictorial that serves as a reminder of what our nation has suffered. Let us not forget those whose lives were irrevocably changed. We encourage our readers to continue to invest their time and resources to helping those who remain in need. Please consider working through affected counties, cities and towns, as well as through nonprofit organizations and the local churches to bring some semblance of order to our impacted brethren.

DAMAGE ASSESSMENT

DISPATCHING THE NECESSARY RESOURCES to respond to a natural disaster of the ferocity and breadth of Katrina proved to be an almost overwhelming challenge.

Federal, state, city and county governments needed to assess the damage inflicted by the hurricane in order to properly dispatch resources. Similarly, electric, gas and telecom companies needed to know where damage was the greatest to quickly restore services to those areas that could receive services. Of course, flooded areas or areas affected by storm surges required different response strategies than areas affected by high winds.

Mark Termini, marketing manager in General Electric's Aerial Imagery Group, responded quickly by dispatching planes to fly routes over the heavily damaged areas to generate black and white, color and color-infrared images. GE donated the digital aerial images to the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) for use in planning emergency response. GE provided comprehensive maps of the damage zone, including regions of greater New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, as well as Mobile, Alabama, and the Mississippi River.

The digital photographs were taken with the Z1 DMC — a digital mapping camera jointly developed by Intergraph and Zeiss — from a fixed-wing aircraft flying at 9000 ft, providing accurate locations to within 1 ft. Each photo provided a 1.25-mile by 2.5-mile image. High resolution was achieved by taking aircraft pitch, yaw and roll into account. Twelve-bit imagery provided considerably more resolution than the 8 bits of resolution typically obtained with scanned film-based photos.