A team of Alaska engineers was to set out Jan. 3, heading to Southeast Asia to assess the damage in the regions devastated by last month's mammoth tsunami.
Four members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Alaska District will assess damage done to transportation lines - referred to as land lines of communication - which include roads, bridges and railways, said David Spence, emergency manager for the corps' Alaska district Jan. 2.
At press time, it had not yet been determined where the team would do their work. The team was to fly commercially to Thailand and then go wherever the need is deemed most urgent, Spence said.
They will join up with the Marine Forces Command, which just arrived there, he said. The team will be gone for about 45 days, but the deployment may be extended.
The team will take with them special engineering equipment used in conducting damage assessments in remote or highly damaged areas. The satellite-based technology allows engineers to send data back to various experts in the United States for suggestions on solutions, Spence said.
"The main focus is to open as quickly as possible the land lines of communication," he said.
Spence said he got a call from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers headquarters the last week of December to prepare his team. The call to deploy came during the New Year's weekend.
The team will be lead by Capt. Theresa Schlosser of Fairbanks. Also deployed are Bruno Sinigaglio, a civil engineer from the Fairbanks office; Anchorage-based structural and environmental engineer Robert Haviland; and Robert Sanders, a geo-technical engineer, also of Anchorage.
The corps often gets deployed to assess damage and rebuild after a large-scale disaster. More than 50 Alaskan corps employees were deployed to Florida after it was slammed by four hurricanes last year. Four are still in the area, Spence said.
"The corps probably had more than 1,500 corps employees there at one time," Spence said. "I was there for hurricanes Francis and Ivan. I was like a storm dodger. I was in Mobile (Ala.) when Francis hit and we had to evacuate to Orlando. It was something."
