Michael Barker normally works a white-collar routine in a safe academic setting teaching college students and conducting research. As a professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wyoming, he specializes in structural engineering and, in particular, buildings and bridges. Nothing unusual.

But every now and then, Barker switches to another life, that of an urban search and rescue worker assisting in disaster relief efforts. College professors like to venture into the real world to augment their research and gain experience to pass on to students, and it may also afford them an opportunity to give something back to society and their local community. Barker carries this to an extreme. Among other places, his adventures have taken him to the aftermath of the 9/11/01 World Trade Center terrorist attacks and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina last year.

Barker’s dual life took shape during a stint as a civil engineering professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia from 1990 to 2002. “While I was there, the local volunteer fire department wanted to put together an urban search and rescue team, and structural engineering is a big part of it,” he recalls. “So they asked me if I was interested in helping develop the team. After a lot of thought, I decided ‘yes, that’s where I would try to give back to the community.’” As a volunteer putting in hundreds of hours of training, he helped them develop Missouri Task Force 1, which became a FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) urban search and rescue team in 1996.

After the World Trade Center attack in New York City, “We worked 24 hours a day for nine or 10 days. We took a team of 65 or so with us, which of course had engineers -- that’s me -- and also search dogs, emergency room physicians, paramedics, logistics people, communications people, rescue people, technical search specialists,” the 45-year-old Barker reports.

His team worked with the Fire District of New York and New York Police Department on the surface recovering personnel, and they also went underground to search beneath the World Trade Centers and in the parking garage under it. They also searched damaged buildings surrounding the World Trade Center. “The bottom line is we did anything we could to help,” as he puts it.

A native of Roseville, Minnesota, Barker got his B.S. in civil engineering from Purdue. “When I went there, I didn’t know what kind of engineer I wanted to be and just studied the different types and decided I wanted to design bridges and buildings, things I could go in and say that ‘I designed this.’ So I went into civil engineering,” he relates. After graduating, he worked as a structural engineer for Sargeant & Lundy Engineers in Chicago. “I was always planning to go back to school. I just wanted to gain some design and construction experience before going back and getting the master’s and Ph.D.”

Following his plan, Barker attained his master’s degree from Purdue and then a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1990. His master’s work focused on concrete and his doctoral efforts on high-level behavior of steel bridges. He explains, “Bridges are beautiful structures, and they’re the lifeblood of our communities. I just took a special interest in them as far as trying to develop more economical designs.”

In 2003, Barker took his current job at the University of Wyoming. But what would happen to his search and rescue career? “Wyoming does not have a team, and instead of losing my participation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which also has structural engineers in support of FEMA activities, picked me up,” he recalls. Working through the Corps as a contractor, he teaches teach classes in structures to FEMA, USACE, and state task force engineers, training them on collapse, rescue, safety, shoring and other areas involved in disaster response.

Then the next major event hit -- Hurricane Katrina. Barker and three of his colleagues spent 16 days on the coast of Mississippi as part of the FEMA/USACE response, which also included teams of administrative personnel, heavy equipment operators, cadaver-searching dogs, and others.

“I was amazed at how much damage the storm surge can create,” Barker says in describing what he saw. The team spent much of its time in Biloxi, Mississippi. “We would go to neighborhoods where the houses were just gone. All you saw was the front step. A little further inland, the flood was so high it just went over schools.”

The main thrust of Barker’s work fell in three areas. First came finding a way to open the lift leaves of the Popps Ferry Bridge. Located on a major highway, the bridge had a power plant on one side and coal-supply barges on the other, and the barges couldn’t reach the power plant. City officials gave the team four days to get the spans open, or the city of Biloxi would go totally without power. The main problem was identified as the hydraulic and electronic control systems, which were deluged with mud after the storm surge submerged them. Barker’s team found ways to overcome the unusable systems and had both sides open with one day to spare on the deadline.

The second charge: evaluating harbors and marinas in the area to restore commercial traffic and rescue operations by water. In general, non-structural portions of buildings such as partition walls and floors were gone. However, main structural support systems and supporting pilings, which were sunk deep, saw little damage.

Barker’s team also inspected more than 40 schools in the region. Many one-story schools had been totally underwater and sustained massive mold problems after the water receded and temperatures rose. The team made structural assessments, roped off unusable areas, and designated what could be salvaged.

Barker says he finds such work “very interesting. We have to be trained in progressive collapse and safety of buildings because when a building is designed, of course it’s safe. But now an earthquake has hit or a terrorist explosion or a hurricane has damaged that structure, so you have to use your forensic engineering knowledge to decide how to approach that structure, how to get the dogs or the searchers inside to look for live victims.”

Search and recovery work requires a special mindset, Barker says. “You have to have the right kind of engineer. You can’t be a desk engineer trying to do calculations and analyzing like we would for a design office. It is seat of the pants, a behavioral understanding of structures and what happens to them during these types of events.”

Barker goes on to say it also requires more than the proper technical perspective. “You have to be willing to go 12, 14 hours a day with way too much to do and not enough time. You have to be able to work with all different types of people. You’ve got to be able to talk to the guy running the bulldozer, or the mayor of the city. You’ve got to be able to work with firemen and policemen. You have to have that right attitude. And that’s a unique engineer. Not everybody is cut out for that.”

It becomes clear how Barker’s alter-ego experiences play into his academic pursuits. “I bring my experiences with the urban search and recovery efforts into the classroom. The forensic engineering is valuable for explaining structural behavior and safety. It helps the students understand failure modes and concepts of redundancy in buildings.”

Whether he realizes it or not, Barker’s work benefits many people in disparate ways. Professors are occasionally accused of living their lives in ivory towers, isolated from the real world, but this one goes a long way to disprove that stereotype.

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2006 Progressive Engineer