A massive effort by Bechtel and the U.S. government provided shelter to tens of thousands of people in Mississippi left homeless following Hurricane Katrina. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) contacted Bechtel on August 29, 2005, the day the hurricane struck. Bechtel teams were on the ground within days, and by September 8, the first mobile housing units had been installed.
As part of a wide-ranging program for FEMA, Bechtel has delivered and readied for occupancy more than 35,000 temporary housing units, which are providing shelter to more than 95,000 people in Mississippi—the fastest such housing operation in FEMA’s history.
Bechtel also has worked with local officials to identify open space that can be used for group housing, and to construct the infrastructure for such group housing locations.
Bechtel’s work on FEMA’s disaster relief effort employed 2,600 people at peak, mostly from Mississippi and other Gulf states. The company used as many local contractors and suppliers as possible. Bechtel made every effort to engage the services of minority- and women-owned firms, and participated in state-sponsored conferences throughout Mississippi to provide local businesses with information about federal government contracting and opportunities. Bechtel awarded 54 percent of its subcontracts to firms in Mississippi, 67 percent to firms in the Gulf region, and 84 percent to small businesses (by dollar volume).
The government chose Bechtel in part because of its experience in responding to national emergencies. The company played a key role in ensuring the safety of recovery efforts following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center; built a camp for 20,000 refugees in Albania, and extinguished Kuwait’s oil fires after the Gulf War in 1991.
GREAT
To help the region address a shortage of skilled labor, Bechtel contributed profits from its initial relief work help make up for the shortfall. Bechtel joined with other companies, community colleges, labor organizations, and government agencies to support an effort to recruit and train up to 20,000 new craft workers by the end of 2009.
The Business Roundtable's Gulf Coast Workforce Development Initiative began in August 2006 with the launch of a targeted marketing campaign called Gulf Rebuild: Education, Advancement and Training (GREAT) to encourage qualified candidates to sign up. Program participants receive training in entry level construction skills and basic safety at community colleges in Louisiana and Mississippi. Contractors work with GREAT to ensure that the trainees’ new skills will match the needs of the rebuilding effort. Many contractors, including Bechtel, have hired program graduates.
Tim Horst, president of Bechtel's Becon Construction Co. and program manager for the initiative, talks about the initiative's goals in a perspective published in Engineering News-Record in November 2006.
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