MORAGA — Shuttered in his home office here, Robert Bea is plugging away at a report that will, once again, make him a target.
The UC Berkeley engineering professor is investigating, with a group he assembled, the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast killed 11 workers and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
The report, due in December, likely will place blame on oil giant BP, which leased the platform, and the facility’s operator, Transocean. And it is likely to bring a volley of public-relations cannonballs to Bea’s front door.
Another volley, that is. Bea’s pointed criticism of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought on a firestorm of rhetoric so intense it brought on post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I used to have a very strong voice,” Bea, 73, said in his post-Katrina voice, a quavering shadow of what it once was. “The body has funny ways of expressing stress.”
The one-story house with a view of the Moraga hills is a strange setting for the study of catastrophe. The house, where Bea and his wife have lived since 1980, was particularly tranquil on a recent morning, with classical music playing in the study.
Far less tranquil was the response Bea received after he told the world the Corps of Engineers was to blame for the failure of the New Orleans levees during Katrina. The hurricane killed nearly 2,000 people in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast.
The hate mail continues to roll in, a few years after his nationally televised demonstration on PBS NewsHour of the weakness of the New Orleans levees brought an immediate, angry response from the Corps. “You’ve been Roved,” one person told him, implying the involvement of President George W. Bush’s adviser, Karl Rove.
Despite the stress, health problems and angst, Bea is not apologizing. After all, New Orleans’ safety is something of a personal cause for him.
In 1965, four decades before Katrina, Hurricane Betsy slammed into the Gulf Coast. As they would later do during Katrina, several New Orleans levees failed, flooding a portion of the city. Among those who lost their homes were the Beas.
“Fast-forward and Katrina comes 40 years later,” said Bea, who had built levees in Florida for the Corps of Engineers in the 1950s. “I thought, ‘This isn’t right.’ We’ve had 40 years to fix these damn things.”
The Corps did not respond to questions about whether Bea’s subsequent investigation led to changes at the agency.
It would be easy for Bea to become discouraged by the seemingly endless shortcomings that allow disasters to occur. But, although he notes his frustration, he continues to prod companies and government agencies to improve.
Everywhere Bea looks, he sees disasters — often preventable — waiting to happen, including the levees around California’s Delta and gas pipelines, such as the one that exploded in San Bruno this month. And few people seem to care, he said.
“We’re not doing anything positive,” he said. “It almost has to be a zero-sum game. It’s scary and discouraging.”
The Texas-raised son of a Corps engineer, Bea has worked with BP, Shell, NASA and a variety of other companies to help prepare them for catastrophes. In a 1998 academic paper, he admonished companies that crisis management was the way to avoid oil blowouts.
“I think the paper was probably read by two people and never implemented,” he said, adding that the Deepwater Horizon disaster could have been avoided in the hour before the explosion if platform workers had reacted quickly to warning signs.
He tends to be close at hand when disasters occur, a coincidence he acknowledges is “creepy.”
In 2003, he was working with NASA in Houston when the shuttle Columbia came flaming over Texas and into the ground. In 1989, he was helping Exxon and others improve oil-tanker safety when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska.
And then there are the lives he may have saved. Among those whom Bea has helped prepare for disaster is Danville pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who safely landed a crippled airliner on New York’s Hudson River last year.
“There’s really no substitute for the kind of understanding that experience brings, and Bob has that in spades,” Sullenberger said. “He’s a real asset to the world.”
Training — as well as natural aptitude — help people like Sullenberger react to catastrophe, Bea said, and a lack of preparation leads to disasters such as Deepwater Horizon. He compared Sullenberger’s reaction to crisis, which saved 155 lives, to watching an orchestra improvise jazz.
“The normal symphonic stuff is what Sully Sullenberger does between Newark and Seattle,” Bea said. “But, when the (poop) hits the fan, that’s when Sully needs to do jazz improv. That’s what Transocean couldn’t do that night” to prevent the gulf spill.
Bea was a vice president at the San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. in 1989 when he applied for a doctoral program at UC Berkeley. The school turned him down and instead offered him a tenured faculty position.
The academic work has helped Bea build his extensive network of experts, which has paid off during his Katrina and Deepwater Horizon investigations. Using what he called “Bob’s coconut wireless,” Bea gathered 60 people — including Sullenberger — to look into what went wrong before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Also on the panel is Bea’s UC Berkeley colleague, business professor Karlene Roberts, who called Bea a curmudgeon who puts his industry ties to good use.
“He is not your standard academic engineer,” Roberts said. “And that is to his credit.”
Curmudgeon though he may be, the past five years have weighed on Bea. Some colleagues have kept their distance, which Bea attributes to their fear of being associated with him. But Bea would change nothing.
“It’s an opportunity for me to give back at the end of my career,” he said. “Most of my career has been selfish.”
Sometimes his research pays off. Walking down the street during a recent trip to New Orleans, he was suddenly hugged by a man who ran across the street to meet him.
“He said, ‘I want to thank you for what you did for Katrina, and I want to thank you for what you’re doing for Deepwater Horizon,'” Bea said. “I think I would probably make the same choices.”
Matt Krupnick covers higher education. Contact him at 925-943-8246. Follow him at Twitter.com/mattkrupnick.
