Alumni Profile

Uniformed engineers deploy to the front lines of public health

In December 2005 the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services swore in Rear Admiral Richard Barror (MS 1975 CEE) as the Chief Engineer of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The corps is one of the federal government’s seven uniformed services and has an inherently humanitarian mission across the country and around the globe. Responsible not only for environmental health and hospital construction, but also disaster and terrorism response, Public Health Service engineers have been on the scene to help people weather some of the most significant emergencies in recent memory.

A wide variety of roles. Traditionally the public health service engineers were the backbone of the Federal drinking water and water pollution programs  that eventually formed the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. In the Food and Drug Administration, public health service engineers get involved in medical device evaluation and in inspection of the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. We also get involved in environmental assessments with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at Superfund sites, looking to see what kind of pollution is occurring and what kind of health effects that pollution has on neighboring populations. We get involved in international health activities and disaster response. A majority of our engineers work for the Indian Health Service, which does the construction of hospitals and health clinics on Indian reservations as well as the maintenance of those clinics and provides water and sewer facilities in the Indian communities.

What happened is I went to Stanford right from my bachelors program at Loyola with a scholarship from EPA with no strings attached to get my degree in environmental engineering. While I was there I was impressed with the graduate program at Stanford, and Dr. Perry McCarty, at the time and was able to secure a fellowship to continue my studies after my Masters degree. McCarty was probably one of the premiere professors looking at a new ways of wastewater treatment. Perry McCarty was one of the few professors I had whose lecture I could listen to and absolutely understand without studying my notes afterward. It was so crystal clear. He really encouraged me to keep going in environmental engineering.

What made the projects in Alaska so exciting?

The projects in Alaska were very technically challenging. For the communities up above the Arctic Circle, water is frozen 10 months out of the year so we had the challenge of providing safe water year-round. Groundwater, if available in non-permafrost areas, was highly concentrated with iron or manganese. For some communities, the only source of water is snowmelt, which had to be collected through surface runoff, which occurs for only three weeks during the spring, and then stored in heated tanks the rest of the year. We had to turn the systems over to the communities and they had to operate them. So they had to be energy efficient and simple to run.

What are some of the adventures the service is engaging in these days?

Now that every federal agency is repositioning itself for emergency response, trying to be more nimble in terms of participating in the National Response Plan (NRP), it seems that PHS commissioned officers are becoming more visible because of our ability to be deployed easily and basically take charge of situations. EPA, for example, has on-scene coordinators for managing disaster responses and coordinating resources and people at the scene. Our officers are becoming more involved with that kind of work, while keeping up with traditional programs like new hospital construction as old ones need replacing.

What do the engineers do there, things like facilities design or process control or safety?

All of it. We’ve got engineers at NIOSH, the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health, that are researching, for example, air handling systems in hospitals for tuberculosis or other airborne pathogens. When the post office buildings were contaminated with anthrax back in 2001 it was our engineers that helped develop the strategies for decontaminating those buildings.

Tell us about the response to Hurricane Katrina.

I actually went down to Louisiana as soon as we could get in there after Katrina. My job was to be the number two person for the Department of Health and Human Service on the ground in Lousiana to help manage HHS’s part of the NRP, which included getting the evacuees with health problems triaged — the ones that didn’t have anywhere to go for healthcare — to get them into some kind of system that we created. These were field hospitals and special needs shelters. There were a lot of elderly people, nursing home patients, or people that were shut-ins. They had to leave in a hurry and  took only some medicine with them not expecting to be gone long. They didn’t have their medical charts. They often presented with exacerbations of chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, when they ran out of meds.  So we had to put them in shelters run by the Red Cross and State, provide medical care, plus making sure that evacuated hospital patients were taken care of. When we finally got people settled and situated, then Hurricane Rita came along and we had to evacuate the New Orleans evacuees out of the western Louisina and Texas regions into other shelters.

PHS engineers worked with the Corps of Engineers to do inspections of hospital facilities that were severely damaged to see what needed to be done to bring them back online. A lot of that kind of work was done in Mississippi. New Orleans is such a long-term disaster that in the few weeks after Katrina we never did look at the physical structure of the hospitals because almost every one was still flooded and closed.

PHS engineers also assisted the Army Corps of Engineers and EPA in inspections of drinking water systems in Mississippi.  In New Orleans, we  had a team of experts, which included engineers, charged with providing an environmental assessment—a health assessment —of the flood water situation. New Orleans was flooded, people were walking through all this water and we had no idea how contaminated it was or whether that water should be pumped out into the surrounding environment without being treated. We helped provide scientific data for all the New Orleans re-entry and clean-up issues having to do with environmental health.  Many difficult questions had to be answered.  Should people be allowed to go back into New Orleans, if there was no safe water, no sewage and no electricity and conditions generally were not healthy?  Our job was to go out and the get the best science we could at the time for the decision makers.

What do you do in terms of international disaster relief efforts?

PHS engineers deployed to Indonesia to help after the floods from the Tsunami in December 2004. They went out on the USNS Mercy, the Navy hospital ship. Operating off the ship, they went into Banda Aceh in Indonesia to help get the hospital there back on line as well as bring up some local water systems and test the water systems that were in operation for contamination.

So what are some of the future directions for the Public Health Service?

The Public Health Service is really posturing itself for disaster preparation and response so that we can be the “tip of the spear” when it comes to responding to any kind of health emergency. That can range from a flood to a bioterrorism attack to radiation from some kind of dirty bomb.