Boh Bros. Has Given New Orleans A Reason To Hope
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| Starting Over. Ribbon-cutting ceremony brought fame to the quiet Boh Bros. and Robert S. Boh. (Photo top by Michael Goodman for ENR; right by Angelle Bergeron for ENR) |  |
Robert H. Boh’s son, Robert S., 47, and his younger brother Stephen, the company’s secretary-treasurer, both also have engineering and business degrees from Tulane. Robert’s two sons, in their 20s, are not involved in the company, and Robert’s daughter and Stephen’s children are in their teens or younger.
Iron Will
Boh’s style has been to own a lot of equipment and a large truck fleet, and about 100 employees are needed to manage it all. Last year, the company invested in a Manitowac 4600 marine crane that will enable them to pursue more shallow-water offshore oil-platform abandonment work, which was a thriving market segment before Katrina and has since mushroomed. Owning a lot of equipment had an unexpected downside when Katrina hit. When the company’s main equipment yard flooded, repairing the fleet became a huge and costly chore.
Boh Bros. has local competitors, such as James Construction Group, but to find a bigger contractor you must head to Baton Rouge, where The Shaw Group has its headquarters. Led by outspoken Jim Bernhard, he couldn’t be a more telling contrast to quiet Robert Boh. As far as the two companies go, “Boh is full of graduate civil engineers, and Shaw is full of retired generals,” says one Louisiana contracting expert. That might be an exaggeration but it shows the dramatic difference between the two types of firms. Conservative, privately held Boh Bros. sticks to what it does well—guaranteed-price work in the Gulf Coast region, and Robert Boh refers to billing based on hours as “white-collar welfare.”
How much Boh’s cash flow has been stretched by Katrina is not clear. Robert Boh will not disclose specifics but laughs at the suggestion his company is cash-rich. “With the way the mail is working [slowly] and the way people haven’t gotten their payments to us, I’m not sure how cash-rich we are,” Boh says.
But the issue is important. One major contract, such as the long-delayed expansion of the New Orleans Convention Center, is partly suspended and awaits in Boh’s words “the revival of the tourist industry.” A slew of Environmental Protection Agency-mandated water and sewer contracts that Boh had been performing also have been stopped. He says he is in the middle of finding out under which ongoing contracts the company can negotiate force-majeure type of delay or escalation claims. Boh has complained that Federal Emergency Management Agency funds are slow in reaching contractors and potential legal liability associated with the post-Katrina repair work is high. Also possibly affecting cash flow is the fact that after the storm Boh Bros. made per diem payments to workers who needed to rent new places to live.
No one understood how much the hurricane would turn the world upside down. On the evening of Aug. 27, 2005, the Saturday before Katrina made landfall, Boh and his wife Ann were having dinner with a couple from Cleveland who had come to town to deliver their son to Tulane University. As many New Orleanians probably were doing that night, the Bohs were telling hurricane war stories and laughing about riding out another one. However, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, when it looked like Katrina would make landfall as a Category 5, Boh packed up his family and headed to his in-laws’ house in Arkansas. Like many people, the Bohs figured they would return in a couple days after the storm passed. Then everything went horribly wrong.
Moving Fast
The following Tuesday, from a hotel room in Destin, Fla., pile-driving engineer Fred Fuchs saw television reports of the breach in the 17th Street Canal levee. An outfall canal that delivers water from the city’s largest pumping station two miles to Lake Pontchartrain, the 17th Street Canal was gushing water into neighborhoods and Fuchs knew he had to get back to work. “As the largest pile-driving/heavy construction firm in the region, I knew someone would be calling us,” Fuchs says. He managed to contact Boh Bros.’ Baton Rouge office and learned that the Corps already had been calling for help.
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| Solutions. Huge floodgate under way at Boh yard. (Photo by Michael Goodman for ENR) |  |
| Test Pile. Examination of levee showed Boh had done its job correctly. (Photo by Angelle Bergeron for ENR) |
Telephone lines were completely out of commission in the greater New Orleans area and cellular communications were almost non-existent. Fuchs chartered a helicopter in Florida and made a flyover assessment of the damage on his way back to the Baton Rouge office, where other employees already had gathered.
Boh Bros. is a family company of families, and it is not unusual to have third-generation employees in the same position that grandfathers once held. The average staff member has been at the company more than six years. Just as New Orleanians had scattered across the country and were unable to determine the whereabouts of loved ones, Robert Boh had no way to gauge the extent of the damage to the company and its work force. Still, he made a verbal agreement with Corps officials to handle emergency repairs and found part of his company when he reached Baton Rouge.
“It was so encouraging to see the number of people showing up in Baton Rouge to go to work because that was one of the signs that we would come back,” Boh says. Many of his employees knew they had lost their homes, but they reported for work anyway. “It was a sign of support, and we really needed that,” Boh says.
With nothing but a verbal agreement, Boh Bros. worked from the evening of Aug. 30 through Sept. 5 with crews that had been pieced together from every department.
With armed escorts, a Boh team made its way through the labyrinth of military checkpoints, toppled trees, downed power lines and flooded streets to reach the site of the breach. Robert Boh remained in the Baton Rouge office because he felt it was the best location from which to coordinate emergency repair efforts, tend to his bedraggled work force and try to salvage whatever business that was not washed away in the flood. With no access to computers, employees prepared bids and a week’s worth of payroll by hand.
While pile-driving crews were sealing the breach, someone organized a crew to break into Boh’s New Orleans office and retrieve records and computers. Since the streets still were flooded, the Corps landed a helicopter on the roof of the building. On a later expedition, a few men used a crane to reach from nearby Interstate 10 to the office’s rooftop.
In Boh’s new, low-tech Baton Rouge command center—quickly rented office space near the satellite office—someone set up a schedule board where jobs were tracked with different colored pens. There was a lot of management organizational work that needed to be done, but Robert Boh missed being in the thick of the action in the field. “If I had to do it all over, I would have come down here and seen it,” he said at a New Orleans site where Boh is handling a levee reconstruction project for the Corps. “I love the work and I love to see it live.”
Before the Louisiana Dept. of Transportation and Development had decided how it would handle repairs to the east-west artery that had been horribly mangled by the storm surge, engineers in Boh Bros.’ bridge department were devising a strategy for how they would go forward with repairs. “They wanted to bid the twin spans, but I thought it was a leap of faith,” Boh says. “I had my doubts that we could do a job at that point with no real handle on our availability of resources. It was hard to measure how many employees we could put our hands on and how much equipment we had.”
Boh Bros. had handled many emergency jobs for DOTD in the past and Boh project managers Al Flettrich and Ed Scheuermann thought that it would award an emergency contract based on merit. When DOTD opted to advertise and award the contract at a special letting, it set the stage for Boh to act.
Boh was low bidder and was awarded the $29.5-million contract to repair the eastbound and westbound bridges. “If it had happened in July, there was no doubt we could have done it, but under these circumstances, it was extraordinary,” says Robert Boh. He notes that 98% of his company’s employees were dealing with “unprecedented personal tragedies” yet managed to keep work moving.
Staying Focused
Boh Bros. has no schemes for growing or even working far beyond the Gulf Coast region. “Generally, what we do does not travel that well,” Robert Boh says. He also does not believe revenue growth is a meaningful gauge of a company’s success. The Boh Bros. approach—a rock-solid balance sheet and plenty of assets in equipment and land—prepared the company for Katrina’s trials. “I think the construction companies that survive over decades like ours have the experience to evaluate risk and reward,” says Boh.
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| Driving Force. Robert S. Boh gets plenty of news from crew at one of the company’s levee repair projects, but funds from FEMA are slow. (Photo by Michael Goodman for ENR) |
One example is the design-build contract for a major bridge reconstruction in Mississippi. The project was estimated at about $150 million and proposals were solicited last year. Boh Bros. submitted a proposal for the project, but Robert Boh says contract terms eventually were attached to the job requiring the design-build contractor to be liable for liquidated delay damages of $157,000 per day for any cause except a named storm. Although Boh Bros. was short-listed and had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its proposal, it pulled out because the risks outweighed the possibility of making tens of millions of dollars in possible early-completion incentives. “We can’t bet the company,” says Boh.
The inability to control nature is much on people’s minds lately. Boh, whose home was flooded, lives in a rented apartment. He notes, “Did we ever imagine this happening? We were always told by the so-called experts that surge in the lake would put water over the top. No one imagined levee floodwalls would fail.” While struggling to rebuild, he tries to enjoy aspects of life that were familiar before. “It’s a pretty exciting time to be living here,” Boh says. “Galatoire’s (a local restaurant) opened last night, and we had dinner there.”
On Fat Tuesday, Boh will ride in Rex, an old-line “krewe” that he has belonged to for years. Boh is not certain if the abbreviated Carnival season will boost the economy or speed the recovery, whether people will come or if the city will have enough hotel rooms for them, or how he will get to the parade lineup on Mardi Gras morning. One thing Robert Boh does know: When June 1, the first day of hurricane season rolls around, “We’re all gonna be a little more scared.”