A Few Good Scientists

n a chilly day in January, engineer Dennis Markle walked around the Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor surveying the scene. Piers could be extended; the main channel might be deepened. Any number of things might be done to facilitate waterborne traffic at the busy port. But what would be the consequences of such expansion for the environment? Would water back up in smaller channels? Would the port be more vulnerable to Pacific storms? What about flash flooding?

Markle wasn't actually in Los Angeles when he scrutinized the port. He was more than 1,700 miles away, standing in a cavernous hangar in central Mississippi, looking at a scale replica of the harbor, complete with vessels, mooring lines and variable tides. The model allows engineers to make proposed changes to the harbor and then precisely measure the effects-before construction ever begins.

A few hundred yards away, in another hangar, is a scale model of the Los Angeles River, where engineers simulate the effects of torrential rains and flooding on the city. That model has saved the city millions of dollars in unnecessary flood-control costs. A short drive away from the hangars sits the most powerful centrifuge in the world, where engineers can recreate the damage earthquakes inflict on California dams and devise ways to reinforce the dams so they can withstand the pressure. Whether they know it or not, Los Angelenos owe a debt of gratitude to Markle and his colleagues at the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Miss.

As chief of the Harbors and Entrances Branch of the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, one of five research and development labs at the Vicksburg facility, Markle has spent considerable time analyzing the environmental and navigational problems at harbors in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The facility's extensive modeling capabilities, both computational and physical, are some of the most sophisticated in the world. "Modeling is not inexpensive," he says. "But the return on an investment of a couple hundred thousand dollars can be millions of dollars."

Markle is one of hundreds of highly skilled scientists and engineers working at the sprawling 673-acre complex in the Mississippi delta, the largest of four R&D facilities operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the largest civil engineering and environmental research complex in the United States. For the last three years, the Waterways Experiment Station has garnered the Army's top honors in the R&D Organization of the Year awards competition. The skills its specialists bring to bear on complex civil and military engineering problems are critical to both defense and national interests. But vacancies in some of the facility's top management positions threaten an impressive track record of research breakthroughs.

The Corps' four research facilities-the Waterways Experiment Station and facilities in Hanover, N.H., Alexandria, Va., and Champaign, Ill.-support eight laboratories and together form the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), which is headquartered in Vicksburg.

The Army began consolidating the labs under one management structure in 1998. The idea was to make the labs more efficient and cost effective by centralizing administrative operations and sharing facilities and expertise. "This change is absolutely essential for the survival of our R&D community," says Joe Roberto, deputy to the ERDC commander. "If we didn't shape our own future, somebody would have shaped it for us."

But vacancies in six of the nine senior civilian positions in the new organization structure-all Senior Executive Service positions-cloud the center's future. Half of these vacancies-one for the center director and two lab director positions-are at Vicksburg.

High-Impact Work

In a state not known for scientific or educational excellence-Mississippi has some of the poorest performing public schools in the nation-the Waterways Experiment Station is an anomaly. More than 15 percent of the 1,300-member workforce at the facility hold Ph.D.s; more than half have at least a masters' degree. Virtually every major scientific and engineering discipline is represented at the site, and a handful of scientists there are considered to be at the top of their fields internationally. As spokesman Wayne Stroupe says, "We hire people with skills from A to Z-anthropology to zoology."

As a student at the University of California's Berkeley campus in the 1960s, James Houston never imagined he'd one day find himself living in Mississippi, working for the Army. If he wasn't interested in going to Vietnam when he moved to Chicago to do graduate work in physics at the height of the anti-war movement, he was perhaps even less interested in going to the Mississippi delta, a place he knew only from the intense media coverage of the bitter struggle for civil rights in the South. But when his draft deferment ran out, that's exactly where the Army sent him to work as a high-energy particle physicist.

In retrospect, it was a lucky break, he says. While he planned to stay in Vicksburg just long enough to fulfill his military obligation, he discovered he loved the job. He is now director of the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory and has presided over some of the most successful projects at the facility.

"I was definitely caught by the work," Houston says. "It's very challenging and not things you typically find anywhere else. You do interesting research that has an impact. That's what kept me here."

While many private-sector science and engineering jobs pay much better than government jobs, they typically involve narrow commercial development projects. Most university jobs typically focus on basic research. But at the Army labs, the work is generally applied research-solving real-world problems, from wetlands restoration to projecting military power. "The research is very tactical-you solve problems we have right now, and you see results, something that is really quite rare in this business," Houston says.

Donald Resio, a senior research scientist at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, is honing the solution to one such problem now. Ever since humans have been navigating the seas, commercial and military activities have been thwarted when waves reach 3 feet and higher-a condition known as "Sea State 3." To tame the seas for military operations over the shore, Resio is developing a "rapidly installed breakwater system model," or RIBS. It is essentially a massive floating V that is placed in the water to deflect high waves, creating a safe harbor for ship-to-shore operations.

"If waves get to be 3 feet and above, everything gets shot down," Resio says. "What we're trying to do is take waves that are 3 to 6 feet and make them 2 1/2 feet or lower." Breakwaters have been around for decades-the military used steel breakwaters during the Normandy invasion of World War II-but easily deployable, sustainable breakwaters are new.

"At Normandy, the breakwaters were very effective-for about two weeks," says Resio. "They worked like a charm, before they were severely damaged in a storm. After that they played a very limited role." More recently, when U.S. troops deployed to Somalia in 1993 to provide humanitarian relief to the war-torn east African country, the operation was critically slowed due to Sea State 3 conditions along the Indian Ocean coast.

The RIBS model Resio is developing is made of lightweight composite material that fills with water for weight and balance when it is deployed. Designed to be deployed in one day, RIBS promises to revolutionize military over-the-shore operations and could be a boon for commercial harbors as well. In Vicksburg, Resio fires up a wave machine in a mammoth water tank to demonstrate the concept. "If we had been able to do this in Somalia, we could have increased off-loading more than 10 times," he says.

World-Class Tools

The facilities at Vicksburg offer scientists one-of-a-kind opportunities to conduct research. Wipawi Vanadit-Ellis, a civil engineer at the Centrifuge Research Center in the Geotechnical Laboratory, says "it does my heart good to visit other facilities-it makes me proud of what we have here." Vanadit-Ellis researches a range of issues involving soil mechanics, such as contaminant migration at toxic waste sites. One of her principal tools is the most powerful centrifuge in the world, which permits three-dimensional analysis of a wide range of field phenomena and environments under laboratory conditions.

"We can simulate a 25-year event in 22 hours," she says. The centrifuge enables scientists to conduct research impossible to conduct elsewhere. Increasingly it is being used to support work at other federal agencies, universities and even commercial organizations, Vanadit-Ellis says.

"In civil engineering, there are very few organizations that can do research at the magnitude that we can do it," says Col. Robin Cababa, ERDC commander.

As a result, the labs have played critical, if not widely known, roles in major civil and military challenges in recent years:

• When U.S. troops deployed to Bosnia in late December 1995, crossing the Sava River, which separates Croatia from Bosnia, became a formidable task as the river underwent the most severe flood in over 100 years. With the river rising hourly, military planners grew increasingly alarmed about the deteriorating situation in Bosnia and the increased delays in deployment. Engineers in Vicksburg went into 24-hour operations to develop computational models of the flooding and devise crossing plans. The Vicksburg scientists helped military engineers bridge the flooding river in a matter of days and ended up providing 455 days of consecutive support to troops in Bosnia.
• As the Los Angeles metropolitan area is further developed, flash floods have become increasingly dangerous. On average, six people die every year in flooding. The Los Angeles River, a 51-mile man-made concrete flume, is one of the world's steepest rivers and can turn 2 inches of rain into a torrent 6 feet high with currents reaching velocities of 30 miles an hour. Faced with the prospect of a massive civil works bill for raising bridges and levees throughout the area, city officials turned to the Corps for help. Extensive modeling showed how extending piers and modifying bridges could increase the flow and reduce the turbulence, thereby reducing flooding. The result was a safer city and savings of potentially millions of dollars.
• When terrorists bombed a U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996 killing 20 service members, experts at the Structures Laboratory began assessing vulnerability of federal buildings and to blast damage. As a result of extensive testing, researchers are now able to make specific engineering recommendations for both new and existing buildings to prevent the kind of damage that occurred in the attack.

Delta Blues

Houston believes the interesting workload is enough to keep a lot of scientists and engineers in Vicksburg-but getting them to come in the first place is the trick. "It's a real challenge to bring people here to Mississippi," Houston says. Recruiting is even more difficult with a booming economy and no military draft to compel young researchers to learn what the labs have to offer.

To try to attract more young scientists, the labs are increasingly reaching out to students, even those in high school, to give them a taste of the kinds of work they could do if they launched their careers in Vicksburg. As Houston puts it: "We get them interested and then we trap them. We try to marry them off to someone local." As one who married a local gal, he sees merit in the tactic.

The labs also maintain a robust outreach program with historically black colleges and universities and other minority institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico. Through education partnership agreements, the Waterways Experiment Station brings students and faculty to Vicksburg for research assignments in exchange for teaching and curriculum assistance.

Recognizing that in the long term it is just as critical to develop talent in-house as to rely on recruiting people to Vicksburg from elsewhere, the facility also runs the WES Graduate Institute, an association of universities offering graduate courses on site. Participating universities-Louisiana State, Mississippi State and Texas A&M-offer graduate degrees in various engineering disciplines, oceanography, computer science, mathematics and statistics. A talented, ambitious employee can earn a doctoral degree without leaving the facility.

But relying on home-grown talent alone won't be enough to fuel the research center's requirement for skilled workers, say several senior staffers. The senior management shortages are evidence enough of that. The labs have to do a better job of continually attracting talent from the outside, says Houston. "We're starting to get old here. We need to start rehiring people."

While he doesn't know exactly how the labs will do that, he is confident the challenging work itself will prove the strongest magnet for new talent in the long run. "People never come here thinking they're going to stay," Houston says. "But the place will definitely grow on you."