Not a day goes by that Walter Baumy, engineering division chief for the New Orleans District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, doesn’t get a call or visit from someone who says he has a better mousetrap a better product or method for bringing the Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System to 100-year levels by 2011. But since the district is now in an all-out push to meet that deadline by rapidly prosecuting designs and contracts in hand, Baumy is wary of the distractions.
So, in response to the flood of ideas, and at the request of district commander Col. Alvin Lee, the evaluation of innovative proposals now is tasked to three teams at the New Orleans district in a program directly supported by the division commander in Vicksburg, Miss. They are comprised of research and development experts from the Corps, private industry and academia. One team evaluates ideas based on their inventiveness, another studies criteria and applications and a third considers practical issues of execution. “One of the key drivers in our asking to form these teams is that our focus can remain on the hurricane system and not be diverted when a complex problem or issue comes up,” Lee says. “We can hand it off and they can run with it.”