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When such an event as a hurricane occurs, it interrupts the normal operations for all our clients.  Two things happen-- first as an organization, we at MMS have to ensure the safety of our personnel first. And that entails getting all the information that we will need in the even there is an evacuation of our personnel. This means getting locations, addresses, phone numbers, emergency contacts and so forth. From also an organizational standpoint, we have to ensure the safety our clients in the offshore industry. That means making sure that they have an emergency evacuation plan that is in place and being used.

Our job changes in that we become more of a communications organization than an actual inspection organization at that point in time. We open our lines of communication to the industry, allowing us to assist them in whatever way possible for the safe evacuation of their personnel and operations of their industry.

In retrospect, what I am most proud of is the job that we do and thanks that we get from the people that we serve.  We are a government agency and we are in existence to serve the public. And when we do our jobs well, that usually means that the public appreciates us.  And they show it in more ways than one.   Hurricane Katrina represented an opportunity for us to show that we could change the face of our organization as necessary to accommodate the public. We went from being a supervisory and a regulatory agency to an agency such as all the other agencies in assisting the public in gaining control and coming back to some sort of normalcy. We provided aircraft, we provided personnel to help them to again to overcome the problems created by the national disaster.

The initial inspection that I performed after the hurricane was one of astonishment for me.  I would have to say that even thought I have been in this business for over 33 years, and we have had hurricanes or tropical storms that come through, we had never witnessed such devastation before.  But in the same terms, there was some surprise too. Because it let me know that the industry is very well protected and that our regulations are doing a good job of telling and advising these people in the offshore industry what they need to do to protect themselves and to protect the environment in the event of such a natural disaster.

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Last Updated: 08/17/2007, 09:00 AM Central Time