Katrina hits home for archaeologist

Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo Photo courtesy R. Christopher Goodwin Associates R. Christopher Goodwin Associates of Frederick, an archaeological research company, maintained an office with about 30 employees on this now-flooded street in New Orleans.

R. Christopher Goodwin, a commercial archaeologist and former Smithsonian scientist, operated two other offices, in Tallahassee, Fla., and New Orleans — until Katrina deluged the Crescent City.

About 35 of Goodwin’s 100 employees worked out of the New Orleans office. The Frederick office, which opened in 1986, is the company’s largest; it is in the old Glass Factory at the corner of East Fourth and East streets

All of the New Orleans employees, Goodwin said, remain with the company and have been transferred to the company’s other offices, including a temporary financial office in Natchez, Miss., while New Orleans remains uninhabitable.

The New Orleans office, which was Goodwin’s first, is expected to celebrate its 25th anniversary in December. Aware of New Orleans’ precarious location during hurricane season, Goodwin said, the company drafted a disaster plan some time ago.

‘‘We moved people around. We had seen hurricanes before, so we had an evacuation plan,” Goodwin said. ‘‘The Saturday before the storm we evacuated all the people, relocating them to the Frederick and Tallahassee offices.”

Goodwin’s company surveys sites for buildings and other structures, sending archaeologists into the field to determine and catalog the property’s historical significance. His staff studies buildings, sites unearthed by new development and shipwrecks to see if the property belongs on the National Registry, or if it can be just cataloged or even moved to a museum.

His clients include developers, private companies and government agencies, including the military. Goodwin declined to discuss his company’s revenues, but said it is classified as a small business by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Louisiana’s oil industry led Goodwin — who is originally from Maryland and attended Tulane University — to open first in New Orleans, he said.

‘‘We work as a direct contractor to gas and oil companies in the New Orleans area, which is why we set up our offices there,” Goodwin said. ‘‘Working for the [fuel companies] was our initial business model. We still work for a lot of the oil companies, but 50 percent of our work now is for the Department of Defense. We also work for a lot of developers.”

One of his company’s recent jobs entailed dispatching an eight-person nautical team to examine shipwrecks in the Chesapeake Bay that might be affected by an Army Corps of Engineers project.

A current project — an excavation of two old mills in Alexandria, Va. — involves one of his displaced employees from New Orleans: Brandi Carrier, the last of the company’s evacuees, who left the city at 2 a.m. the day before Katrina struck.

‘‘I was scheduled to come home [from Alexandria to New Orleans] for the weekend” anyway, she said.

‘‘By early morning Saturday, it was evident that everyone was going to have to leave. I could have left on Saturday, but chose to leave [in the middle of the night] to avoid the traffic problems.”

Carrier is now living out of a suitcase.

‘‘I consider myself really fortunate,” she said. ‘‘I haven’t experienced any interruption in work or pay. One of the things where we’ve been very fortunate [as a company] is we haven’t seen any layoffs. We are continuing to get paid and being taken care of at the basest of levels.”

Goodwin said he was on the phone to the company’s CFO in New Orleans two days before Katrina made landfall. He had already started breaking down the office, located near the 17th Street levee, which later was breached, inundating parts of the city.

Saturday was spent removing important files and electronic equipment, Carrier said. What couldn’t be removed was moved to higher elevations within the building and covered with plastic.

The building housing the office suffered some damage to the roof, and up to 4 feet of water flooded the office, Goodwin said.

With employees now moved to other offices, Goodwin has tried to make sure they are not performing redundant duties. At the same time, he has rearranged job schedules to get as much work as possible of his field personnel.

He has also appealed to clients and vendors to help the company adjust to its ad hoc arrangements.

Goodwin asked them to forward invoices and payments to the Frederick office. He also emphasized to clients the need to promptly pay their bills as the company is working to provide its ‘‘relocated staff with housing and living expenses.”

Goodwin is determined to make sure his employees don’t miss a paycheck because ‘‘it’s the right thing to do. Our assets are our brain trust.”

While the financial hit is expected to be considerable, Goodwin said there is no way yet to quantify it.

‘‘It’s going to cost us,” he said. ‘‘The housing allowance — there’s no way to pass that on to the customers. I bought 25 plane tickets [for the employees]. We’ll absorb it eventually. There are more important things than the bottom line. Doing the right thing takes precedence.”

Goodwin and Carrier estimated that up to eight of Louisiana employees have either lost or heard rumors of damage to their homes and about six workers who had been in the field lost vehicles they had left at the New Orleans office.

Most of the employees got away with only what they could carry.

‘‘If Hurricane Rita doesn’t do significant damage to the city, we’ll be able to get back to our homes probably within the next week,” Carrier said.

Carrier and Goodwin stressed the need for a rebuilt New Orleans.

‘‘It’s absolutely important,” Carrier said of rebuilding. ‘‘The majority of the nation’s fossil fuels come through there. There is a huge [number] of jobs that would be lost, plus the culture. We all want to see it go back to normal.”

In addition to providing housing to almost 30 displaced employees, Goodwin is personally hosting the family of a college friend who lost his restaurant to Katrina. Currently the former restaurateur is working as a chef at the Comus Inn in Montgomery County.