Lisa Glatch helped the federal government take over airport screening after the 2001 terrorist attacks and worked to mobilize workers for Fluor Corp. in Iraq.
But she said nothing compares to her current task: overseeing Fluor’s hurricane work for the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and other federal agencies.
Fluor recently won an initial contract valued at up to $100 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to build temporary housing and provide communications gear to help the more than 1 million people displaced by the hurricane.
Glatch, a senior executive with Aliso Viejo-based Fluor, was appointed a president in charge of the construction and engineering company’s government group and is playing a key role in the hurricane work.
This isn’t Glatch’s first stint in handling a national disaster. In 2002, she served six months as a loaned executive to Transportation Department Secretary Norman Mineta. She advised and assisted with starting up the newly formed Transportation Security Administration in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Glatch has been with Fluor for 18 years in a variety of management posts.
She graduated from the University of Colorado with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and has completed courses at the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The Business Journal’s Pat Maio talked with Glatch about Fluor’s hurricane work.
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Setting up house: Fluor’s Chuck DeBellevue setting up trailer in New Iberia, La. |
What is Fluor doing in the Gulf region?
We have two contracts with FEMA. We’ve had a contract with FEMA for eight years where we draw upon resources from throughout the company, nationwide and worldwide, to respond with public assistance when there is a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or earthquake.
We provide people with our kind of background, estimating construction costs. We look at damaged public facilities and do proper estimates so FEMA can provide an appropriate level of funding to support their rebuilding. We’ve done this for many years.
What we are doing on this new contract that is different than what we did in the past is providing temporary housing. The $100 million ceiling contract is about housing, and so we are doing all the legwork to site, identify locations, work with conceptual designs for these communities, order all of the trailers and build the infrastructure.
How do you build a temporary city?
Some of those strategic questions aren’t necessarily in our scope of work. The federal government is working with the state. Both have the responsibility in the long term to define what that community is going to look like. What our contract is really about, in the short term, is putting roofs over people’s heads. We’ve got a lot of people in need. So we take direction from FEMA to basically site, procure and put in place temporary housing to solve the immediate needs. Meanwhile, the federal government is trying to work to determine what truly is the longer-term solution.
What do the temporary houses look like?
They are just trailers, basically seven-feet wide by 20-feet long. They are commercially available trailers. That’s the thing about Fluor and contractors who have contracts to do this. We have an established network of suppliers. So it was fast for us to secure trailers, where we could go quickly out to our network.
These won’t be built from ground up. They’ll be pretty much prefab. We have to make sure the infrastructure is there to support it. It’s one thing to live in a modular unit, and another to have all of the water and power and the infrastructure to support a community of trailers.
Where is the temporary housing going to be placed?
Clearly there is a need to house a lot of people as close to the vicinity as possible. There are practical reasons for that. Part of our strategy is not just to put roofs over heads,which is very important,but we want to give jobs to people, too. First, people want to be near where their home was. Secondly, if they are located nearby, we can employ them. We will need a tremendous number of skilled craft people. There are a tremendous number of people who are out of jobs. We actually are setting up craft training centers where we will try to train the people who are living in temporary housing to do the job of rebuilding in the Gulf region.
Where will Fluor base its operations for the Gulf efforts?
Our field execution team will be in Baton Rouge, but we also have our Greenville, S.C., office, which is already set up to support all of our FEMA work.
Is this population displacement unlike anything you’ve ever seen?
Yes. Even the president has said this. It is something on such a magnitude of scale that has just not ever happened before. There are so many displaced people in the U.S. It’s just monumental. There are social implications; there are all of these tactical needs immediately. It’s just tremendous to think about all these people and jobs lost. How do you get them back on their feet again and rebuild their lives? How do you help them put their lives and communities back together? It’s just monumental.
I was involved with the Transportation Security Administration after the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. Our chairman (and Chief Executive Alan Boeckmann) got a call from Secretary Norman Mineta, where I was loaned from Fluor as an executive to help with starting up that new agency.
We had one year to federalize the entire airport-screening workforce. I thought that was monumental. Little did I know, after that I got called upon to help in Iraq, and so I led the effort there. I thought that was monumental,mobilizing thousands of people. And now this, there is no comparison.
It’s worse. It’s different. I hate to belittle Iraq, because that was no easy feat to try to rebuild Iraq with people shooting at people. This work in the Gulf just makes that pale in comparison. You know, it sounds crazy, but it almost is easier to get things set up in Iraq. Here, you’ve got this city that is unbelievably filled with water, and all the fundamentals are not working, including power, sewers and communications. It’s just amazing, all these people with nowhere to live. It’s just amazing.
Paint a picture of the differences from your post-Sept. 11 responsibilities versus what is going on now.
In the Sept. 11 situation, my role in that was putting in place preventive measures for the future. I worked with Mineta and tried to figure out how to overhaul airport-screening processes, so that they were superior, and would prevent a major tragedy in the future. So the really horrendous thing had happened, and we were trying on a very urgent basis to put preventive measures in place for the future. In this case, with the Gulf of Mexico, you see new faces every night. It’s so urgent because people are suffering every day that something isn’t getting done. If something doesn’t get done, there continues to be more suffering. This is different in that regard.
How long will Fluor’s work last in the Gulf?
It’s going to be going on for a very long time. Obviously, there is the initial focus on housing, getting roofs over people’s heads, so they can have some sort of decent living conditions in the very near term. The efforts in the Gulf are affecting almost every industry we work in. We work with all the oil companies, and have built a lot of power capacity in the U.S. in the last few years. So all of our power company customers need help. We work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and we actually put in a bid last week for work being let there.
This is for some infrastructure work that the Army Corps needs to have done. We have some other requests that we’ve been asked to respond to, including a U.S. Air Force base that was damaged in the area. There are a number of fronts that we are involved in. Ultimately there will be infrastructure needs, from roads to transportation systems, to power, refining industry and chemical plants. Those are all of our customers in normal times. We are in communication with all of them to try and work with them to see how we can help.
Do you see potential business opportunities?
Helping the military to rebuild its own infrastructure, FEMA and temporary housing, infrastructure rebuilding, helping oil refineries get back online, and power plants get their systems returned to service. And, I think as important as anything, training people who are out of jobs to get them to help do all of this.
Is it fair to say Fluor stands to gain billions of dollars in contracts from the federal government to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf coastline?
It’s possible, yeah. If you look at what happened in Iraq, we ended up seeing a couple billion dollars worth of work there.
It’s up to the federal government as to how they choose to distribute the work. The congressional funding, something like ($62 billion) out there,it could go beyond that. I am pleased to say Fluor is in a tremendous position to help. We are in a tremendous position to meet the needs that have been unfortunately created by this devastating hurricane.
Did Fluor executives create some sort of red team internally to get their arms around this massive cleanup effort?
That already has been formed and is being led by our chairman and CEO. It was created instantaneously after this happened. That’s just how Fluor works. We have multiple business units, but we work extremely close together. With 35,000 employees, we are who we are because we are very dynamic and have the fleet of foot and have the ability to rapidly redeploy our resources to wherever they are needed. Within 14 hours after the hurricane, we had a couple hundred people on the ground in the Gulf. When Iraq happened, we went from zero to a couple billion dollars of contracts, and mobilized people into Iraq instantaneously.
Are you looking at billions in damage?
Yes. It’s a very, very big number. The total scope, whether it’s all of Fluor’s or others,it’s going to cost in the billions.
Is this more challenging than rebuilding Iraq?
They are all different. If you had interviewed me at the time we were mobilizing our people to Iraq, who knows what I would have said then. But it is different and tremendously challenging. Some of our folks who were based in Iraq the past couple of years have said I didn’t think anything could be more challenging than Iraq. When they got to the Gulf, many said, “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this.” So I’ll use their frame of reference. I didn’t think there was anything more challenging than Iraq.
