An Oral History

with

William “Bill” Parsons

SSC History Project

Interviewer: Martin Oramous

2005
Biography

William W. Parsons is the Director of NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center. He 

graduated from the University of Mississippi with a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering. 

He graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Master’s degree in 

Engineering Management. 

He began his career in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry Officer, then 

worked as a manufacturing engineer and later as an aerospace engineer at Cape 

Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. In 1990, Parsons joined the NASA team at 

Kennedy Space Center as a Launch Site Support Manager in the Shuttle Operations 

Directorate and also worked as an Executive Management Intern and later as the Shuttle 

Flow Director of the Shuttle Operations Directorate at KSC. In 1996, he became Manager 

of the Space Station Hardware Integration Office at KSC. 

He was first assigned to Stennis in 1997 as the Chief of Operations of the Propulsion Test 

Directorate. Parsons relocated to NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston to become the 

Director of the Center Operations Directorate. He later served as Deputy Director of 

Johnson. He returned to Stennis in 2001 and served as the Director of the Center 

Operations and Support Directorate. His first stint as Stennis Center Director was in 

August 2002. He became the Space Shuttle Program Manager in May 2003. As Space 

Shuttle Program Manager, Parsons led the Return to Flight Activities for the agency and 

played a major role in the recent success of the Discovery STS-114 mission. He was 

named the new Director of the NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center on September 13, 

2005.

Parsons has received numerous honors, including the Presidential Rank Award, NASA’s 

Distinguished Service Medal, Exceptional Service Medal; the National Intelligence 

Medal of Achievement; the Silver Snoopy, awarded by astronauts for outstanding 

performance in flight safety and mission success; the Center Directors’ Commendation; 

and the Commandants Certificate of Commendation from the U.S. Marine Corps.
1

An Oral History

with

Bill Parsons

This is an interview by the Stennis Space Center History Office. The purpose of this 

interview is to document the story of key personnel during/after Hurricane Katrina at 

SSC. The interview is with Bill Parsons and is taking place on November 30, 2005. The 

interviewer is Martin Oramous. Also present are Paul Foerman and Shelia Reed.

BILL PARSONS: Bill Parsons, I’m the Center Director at the Stennis Space Center. 

About a week before the storm, I found out that I’d be coming back to Stennis as the 

Center Director. Rex Geveden called me up and asked me, “Would you go back to 

Stennis?” And I said, “Absolutely.” Prior to Katrina, they called Tom Donaldson and 

informed him of the decisions that were being made, but of course, Katrina was bearing 

down on Stennis, and we said we would talk about this after the storm. Although the

storm was a pretty strong storm, and was headed toward the New Orleans area, it was still 

the mindset of O.K. it’ll pass through, there will be some damage and then we will get 

back to work. Of course the storm increased in intensity. It ended up turning a little bit 

more north, coming right over Bay St. Louis and Stennis. Having lived on the Gulf Coast 

before and being from Mississippi as well as having been the Center Director here before, 

I have a lot of friends here, a lot of family in the area and so I was glued to the television. 

Watching CNN, the Weather Channel trying to find out what was going on. Of course I 

knew it was going to be a pretty bad one. I don’t think I had a clue as to how bad it was 

going to be, but I knew it was going to be pretty bad. On Monday the storm hit, Monday 

morning. On Tuesday afternoon, Rex Geveden called me at my Florida home and said,

“Can you come to Washington and be the senior NASA official in charge of disaster 

Katrina Recovery for both Michoud and Stennis?” I said, “Absolutely.” I got on the 

airplane. Arrived in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday morning. I began operating the 

Emergency Operations Center in Washington, connecting to the other Centers. Stennis 

and Michoud are now two days or so into the recovery time. The folks down here were 

doing the best that they could with what was going on and Headquarters needed to 

mobilize and try to do what we could, from a Headquarters standpoint, coordinating all 

the agency assets and activities to help Michoud and the Stennis area. I operated from the 

Washington, D.C. area Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and on Saturday morning I 

moved myself to the Marshall Space Flight Center. It seemed like a closer point to what 

was going on both at Michoud and at Stennis. I stayed at Marshall one whole day, 

Saturday. On Sunday morning, they had a NASA airplane coming down to Stennis. I 

jumped on it. Arrived down here Sunday morning. Almost a week after the storm and 

began operating as the NASA Senior Official for disaster recovery from the Stennis 
2

Space Center. It was not very long after that, probably not that day, the next day that I 

took a helicopter trip over to Michoud. Michoud was surrounded by water. They still had

not had an opportunity to get any other supplies in to Michoud other than by helicopter. 

They still had the ride-out crew there hanging in there. I had the opportunity to land there, 

observe some of the damage. As we flew back, we went down along the Slidell area and 

across to Bay St. Louis, Waveland and down a little bit into Gulfport. From a helicopter it 

was devastating to see what had happened. It was unbelievable. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Had you ever seen anything like that before?

BILL PARSONS: No, nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was here as a seventh 

grader for Camille. My dad was stationed at Keesler Air Force Base. We were getting 

ready to move to the Mississippi Gulf Coast when Camille hit. So it delayed our 

movement from my hometown of Magnolia, Mississippi to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 

about four months. So, I came here four months after Camille and moved into College 

Park in Gulfport, Mississippi. I remember I rode up and down Highway 90 and saw what 

the results were of Camille. By then, to be quite honest, it was pretty cleaned up. They 

had cleared a lot of the debris. There were a lot of slabs out there. We had the ship, the 

boat that was over across Highway 90 and of course some of Highway 90 was damaged 

and all that but nothing like anything that I saw during Katrina. So, again that just takes 

your breath away. It kind of makes your gut hurt when you see what had happened.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: There was no way to prepare for it?

BILL PARSONS: No, no. Over the next few days, one of the things I did do was I wrote 

a good friend of mine an e-mail. His name is Joe Dowdy. He went to Ole Miss with me. 

He and I went in the Marine Corps together and he spent 24 or 25 years in the Marine 

Corps as an Infantry Officer. He had a great deal of experience in Lebanon, in 

Mogadishu, Somalia and in Iraq. I just said, “Hey are you free?” He is now out of the 

Marine Corps, and he has a consulting business. I haven’t seen him in about 20 years, but 

we had stayed in contact through phone calls and writing. I just sent an e-mail and said,

“Are you available to come help me with hurricane relief down at Stennis?” He said,

“Absolutely.” That was really all I got back. I said, “Are you serious?” He said 

“Absolutely.” We brought him on contract with Jacobs Sverdrup through Marshall. He 

showed up and met me at Marshall when I arrived there. He got on the airplane and came 

down here with me. He was extremely helpful in organizational kinds of things that we 

needed to do to continue the disaster recovery and things we were dealing with. One of 

the things probably most important was the fact that he recognized immediately that 

having a helicopter go into Michoud was not a sustaining kind of logistical support that 

would last very long. After he flew the route with us, he said, “We’ve got to get trucks in 

there.” It turned out that the military was trying to get a forward base. They saw that 

Michoud was an island. They were headed that way. Joe went over and discussed it with 

the Navy Seabees and some other military folks. He was able to get a NASA contingent 

to go with him and got a convoy through. That was probably about 10 days after the 

hurricane. That was a big moment because we were taking bottled water and supplies by 

helicopter, and you can only just do so much, and they needed so many other things to 
3

sustain their ability to keep the facility safe so that we could recover from Katrina. So, we 

got a convoy through and after that we were able to get convoys through on a regular 

basis. Joe probably spent the next four or five days just taking trucks back and forth 

because he knew the route, and he was comfortable with it. It’s something that he had 

done many, many times before in other situations. So, he was very instrumental in 

helping MAF. MAF did a number of things for themselves. They were very innovative. 

They were forward thinking. They ended up putting in a water well eventually but before 

that we did get a Reverse Osmosis Purification Unit (ROPU) from AMES Research 

Center. They drove the ROPU all the way from the San Jose, CA area straight through to

Mississippi. Joe met them immediately when they got here. We shot them over to MAF 

and began making water. They had enough water up to that point but water was 

becoming a concern because the New Orleans water, natural gas and electricity just 

weren’t coming into the place. Probably the biggest other factor that we dealt with was 

diesel and gasoline. The contractors and the various folks that worked that from all levels 

of NASA allowed us to get the fuel that we needed to keep the generators operating to 

produce emergency electricity. We were able to restore commercial power to Stennis 

pretty quickly. I can’t remember the date. I know that it was within 10 days or so. That 

was a big day. That was just power coming in and then it took many days after that to 

ripple that through and bring up different buildings here at Stennis. But that was pretty 

big and the fact that we had fresh water was pretty big.

I guess somewhere in there Tom Donaldson and I talked about the transition of me as the 

Center Director. We decided that it would be in the best interest of Stennis and ongoing 

operations for me to take over as the Center Director. We discussed this with NASA 

Headquarters. They agreed. Tom and I made the transition. We were still working really 

hard. FEMA was coming in here and had logistical support being based out of here. We 

had a lot of military coming in here too. We decided that Tom would go over as part of 

the Governor’s office and work with MEMA, Mississippi Emergency Management 

Agency and FEMA and be an on loan executive from NASA to work with them and the 

coordinating of their activities through at least the six county area along the Mississippi 

Gulf Coast that was affected by Hurricane Katrina. He began doing that and I continued

working the recovery of Stennis and MAF. I worked the day to day activities at MAF 

until they became more self-sufficient. That took probably a month, maybe a little bit 

longer. When they became self-sufficient, my role as the NASA Senior Executive in 

charge of recovery diminished a little bit. I was still working budget issues, 

supplementals, damage as well as what we were going to do for recovery. Because I was 

the previous shuttle program manager, I was very interested in the damage to the external 

tanks and how we were going to get those back on-line and how we were going to get 

tanks from the Kennedy Space Center back to Michoud so they could begin the work to 

do Return-to-Flight II. The Shuttle Program made some tough decisions. Decided to 

move the tanks back from KSC to Michoud which started the road to recovery of the 

Space Shuttle assets to be able to launch in May or sometime early next year. The last 

thing I would tell you is there are a lot of individual stories, but the one big story is how 

this agency came together to help the Stennis Space Center and Michoud Facility. Within 

this agency we’re not beyond being very critical of what we did. But I’ll tell you if any 

outsider had watched this agency perform and watched the NASA contractor employees 
4

perform you would be proud to be a part of this agency. They responded to this disaster. 

They took care of the people. They gave the funding required to jump on the recovery 

almost immediately where the buildings would not be any further damaged. They 

committed themselves to learning how to do this better. They are going through a lessons 

learned process right now. We have had hurricanes at the Kennedy Space Center and 

Langley. We have dealt with hurricanes here at Stennis, and of course, Rita came in soon 

after Katrina and threatened the Johnson Space Center. I believe for upcoming natural 

disasters or any kind of man-made disaster, this agency is better prepared due to the fact 

that we have dealt with hurricanes, the Columbia and Challenger disasters, and now one 

of the largest natural disasters in recent times and we’ve done a darn good job of it. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: You are talking about a lot of people here not only in the 

agency who came together and tried to help but the number of people who were affected, 

who lost their homes and not sure if they are going to have a job or not. What point and 

what did you think about as far as how are we going to get these people taken care of?

BILL PARSONS: Well, I can tell you the first thing you do is you take care of the 

people. These facilities and everything else won’t get better unless the people are there to 

bring them back up. Then the next most important thing was to make sure the people had

what they needed. They had information, and they knew they were going to get paid. 

They knew that if you needed to get out of this area and get your kids in school, we were 

going to do what we could to get you there. They knew that this agency was going to take 

care of them. Not only our civil servants but our contractor employees, and I think that 

setting the tone of “you don’t have to worry about that” was key. Because that’s what 

everybody was worried about. We are going to take care of you and just get yourself in 

order and we’re going to keep you informed and we’re going to let you know how to get 

in touch with FEMA, and we are going to have workshops, and we’re going to have 

places you can go and ask questions, and we’re going to bring in people to talk to you. 

We’re going to get the Red Cross in here. Doing all of those things, helped people first 

see that there was a way through this maze of what was going on and the tragedy that 

occurred. Also, I think it helped us all get to bond and work towards a common goal. I 

would say, that if any positive can come out of a disaster like this it is watching people 

take care of each other and look after each other and get themselves on their feet. One 

other thing that we did do was we held an All Hands, and I brought in Roy Estess. Roy 

Estess was here for Camille, and he had a lot of lessons learned from that hurricane. The 

External Affairs folks brought me documentation from back in Camille time. I read 

through that and got a lot of good ideas of things that we could do, but Roy offered a lot 

of things that they did during Camille with people going out clearing trees and helping 

remove carpet, sheetrock and things like that. So, we established employee teams and 

started doing that. We worked closely with our resident agencies and the Navy to make 

that happen, and I think all of that in itself was part of this recovery process. Roy also 

said they didn’t do a bit of government business, NASA business, for about three months. 

So, I was already prepared to say if we go through Christmas, and we don’t get any 

NASA business done, that’s O.K. But I was extremely surprised on 0ctober 10th or 11th or 

something like that we tested a RS-68 engine. On October 22 we tested a SSME, Space 

Shuttle Main Engine, for the first time. So, I think with the fact that we put people first 
5

and we worked that then, they felt comfortable that we weren’t going to forget them. We 

knew some things weren’t happening as fast as we wanted them to. We weren’t getting

people in homes as quickly as we would like, but they knew that we weren’t going to 

give up on that, and they knew that we were going to continue to work for them. I believe

what helped is they said, “Well, there are certain things that we could do at work and let’s 

concentrate on that while we are waiting for other things to work themselves through.”

And we did that. I think the test kind of said, “Hey folks, if we want to get back to work, 

we can.” I think you realized we had about 25% of our employees either lost their homes 

completely or couldn’t live in them. About 75% of employees that didn’t lose their 

homes or didn’t get impacted but they probably had extended family members or all 

kinds of different situations they were dealing with. So, I don’t think that from a whole 

it’s probably a good statistic to say 25% lost their homes. It was probably more like 60%-

75% of the Stennis people were significantly impacted.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: I work here. I can’t think of one person that I’ve talked to since 

the storm that didn’t have something happen to them. Trees on their house, water, they 

might be able to live in it right away but everybody got hit. You have a kind of feel for 

how this community reacted and responded and also how are we doing now? Three 

months out. Everybody is still talking about it.

BILL PARSONS: Sure. Well, I’m a Mississippian and I think the community are a 

bunch of tough people. I think the state of Mississippi responded pretty good. Stennis

responded outstanding. Setting up our partnership with FEMA and military organizations,

but I think the state of Mississippi did pretty darn good. I watched the Governor and I 

watched the way the local officials responded and so, and so forth and nobody was 

grandstanding and nobody was trying to get the CNN spotlight on us. They didn’t mind if 

it was over in New Orleans. I think what I saw was people saying, “O.K. That was a 

pretty nice punch. That’s harder than we’ve been hit than I can remember but we’re going 

to get back up and we’re going to get going again.” As I walk around, the people with the 

biggest smiles probably lost everything. It’s kind of interesting and the people that were 

kind of shaking their heads when you ask them what happen, they said, “I did O.K.” And 

they look down and that meant that they didn’t lose their homes or they got two foot of 

water or four foot of water but they say, “I did O.K. compared to some people.” I was just 

amazed at the resiliency of the people along the Gulf Coast and all the people that work 

here. I think over the last three months, we made tremendous progress. We still have a 

long way to go. We still have a lot of people living in temporary housing, but we’ve 

allowed everybody to get off the site as far as living in office spaces. That took 2 1⁄2 

months. We had people living in offices for 2 1⁄2 months and we finally have gotten all of 

those folks in at least trailers or some other temporary place. We still have probably 70 or 

80 trailers or RVs on the site at different places. A lot of those, and I would say probably 

90 percent of those are Navy. Many of the military personnel are supporting the war in 

Iraq or doing other things in support of DOD missions, and we felt it was necessary that 

those folks stay out here to support the mission then that was the right thing to do. We do 

have some NASA folks in RVs out here. The NSSC, the NASA Shared Services Center, 

was trying to build up and move here to Stennis. Of course this threw a big chink in it. 

But to ensure that they were still going to come here and to work with the NSSC to make 
6

that happen, we’ve moved some RVs out here so that folks that are trying to set that up 

can utilize those RVs and continue to work to get the NSSC set up here at the Stennis 

Space Center. Continue to bring those jobs here.

It’s kind of interesting, of the 48 NASA people that lost their homes, I offered them a 

one-way ticket anywhere they wanted to go, to any center and we would make it happen. 

I said, “You can leave and you can go to another center and we’ll get you a job and we 

will PCS you, Permanent Change of Station, and we’ll take care of you.” Of the 48 only 

five or six chose to do that. That says that the five or six people said, “I don’t have 

anything there and I don’t have anything to go back to and I just don’t want to go back.”

But then think about it, 42 people who lost everything said, “No, that’s my home. I’m 

coming back. I’m going to rebuild and we’re going to make it work.” That is just one 

statistic of a lot of statistics that are like that. I would say that there are a few people that 

left. There are a lot of people that there is just no way in the world they’re going to go 

anywhere. They’re going to rebuild right here and stay in this community and it will be 

better. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: What about you? Is there anything that stands out in your mind 

that is the hardest thing that I’ve had to deal with, the biggest obstacle? The thing that 

kind of hit you in the gut that said, “How are we going to handle this? How are we going 

to solve this problem?”

BILL PARSONS: Well, I think when I had almost 300 people living out here on the site 

in offices and I walked around and visited with them, and I saw their kids and I saw their 

elderly parents or their dog or whatever situation they had, when I saw those folks and I 

talked to them and they would tell me, “Thank you, I had no where else to go,” that 

probably tore at me more than anything. You have to weigh this compassion and 

everything that you are trying to do against hey we’ve got to enable these folks to get 

back on their feet and try to determine what is the right time to ask them to leave. When 

can they leave, when is it really that they can leave and how much or how far do we go? 

You want to make it the right balance because you can’t just ... people don’t need to be 

living in office spaces. It’s not the right thing to do. On the other hand, when they don’t 

have anywhere else to go, what else can you do. So weighing that and making those 

decisions was probably for me the most tough human decision that we had to make. I had 

a lot of people helping with that, and I would say that we did it pretty well. I think that 

the balance was about right. It’s not to say that there weren’t people that found 

themselves in pretty tough situations. But the fact is I think the balance was right. That 

was the hardest thing for me. Just knowing that you had to enable these folks to kind of 

get on with their lives and getting on with your life was not living in an office space here 

at the Stennis Space Center. Enabling them to find a way to get themselves a home and 

start setting up and start being part of the community again. Because we are isolated from 

the community. We have 125,000 acres around us and we are isolated from the 

community. So, if you are out here, you are isolating yourself from the part that’s 

rebuilding and to get those folks back out in the communities, that’s where you start 

rebuilding. That’s where this community which is so important to the Stennis Space 
7

Center starts rebuilding. This community was so devastated that was really tough to do. 

We’re still working on it. We’re not done. We have a long ways to go.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Is there anyway to compare what you have had to deal with here 

with anything else that you have ever faced?

BILL PARSONS: You know this is probably going to sound a little funny. The Shuttle 

Program was harder. The reason for it was it was hardware, it was technical decisions. 

Dealing with Katrina and the people hurt. This was harder from a stress standpoint. This 

was hard in that it was people, but it was so easy to make the decisions. For me, the 

decisions were so much easier because it was about people, and it was about doing the 

right thing for the people. Doing the right thing for that hardware in the Shuttle Program, 

you had 15 opinions and everybody had a technical paper they wanted to show you. 

Every decision I made was so difficult and there was never a clear right or wrong, white 

or black or anything like that. So that made it hard. Here it was easy because when you 

said we’re going to do the right thing for the people and when you focused on those kinds 

of decisions it was usually clear what the right thing was although it was heart wrenching 

to the see the devastation and to know these people had been through what they had you 

also gained strength by watching people deal with their issues. It was easier to make the 

decisions because you just did the right thing. Making sure you ask people, “What do you 

need? “What is your biggest obstacle and how can I help you?” And they would tell you 

and you would go, “O.K. I can make that happen.” That gave you a sense of 

accomplishment, and it made me feel really good. So I don’t know. That’s kind of the 

way I’ve looked at it. This was tough from a human standpoint to watch just how many 

people were impacted by this, but it was so much easier from a leadership and 

management standpoint because it was easier to pick the right thing to do.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: You know this is going to happen again some time, probably, 

maybe not while you’re here.

BILL PARSONS: I hope not.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Is there anything you might tell someone who would be in a 

similar position as you that could help them out?

BILL PARSONS: Well, I think the Stennis Space Center was/is in a position to deal 

with such a disaster, a category 4 or 5 hurricane and although we sustained a great deal of 

damage we did very well. This center will improve its position from where it was because 

of the money that we will put into the facility and the things that we will do to ensure that 

we will be better off the next time. So, I think from a facilities standpoint and from a 

center and everything else, this center is prepared. I think that this community has to be 

aware that evacuation is paramount and that the Stennis Space Center, although a place to 

come to, is not the ideal place to come. It’s a last resort. When you evacuate here, it is a 

last resort, but we had no choice but to open our doors at that point and time when people 

are evacuating. If they can’t get any further than here, then they should come here, and 

we’ll protect them. Hopefully, we’ll build some facilities and do some things that might 
8

help us do that better because we weren’t really ready, and we’re not set up to do that to

the extent that we did it for Katrina. But then I think that the most important thing that I 

learned is that in the plan that when the hurricane goes through, it’s not turn your radios 

in and get back to work. Just go assess the damage and get back to work because I think 

when you have a disaster of this size, and it takes out peoples’ homes and people are 

displaced from their homes, I think you need to plan for the fact when you have 

employees that have no where to go, and they don’t have a place to live they’re going to 

have to have a place to stay or they are going to have to have some kind of shelter or 

they’re going to leave. If they leave, you’re not going to be able to do your mission. This 

Agency is located in areas that have all kinds of different disaster scenarios that can 

occur, and we need to plan for the displacement of people from their homes for extended 

periods of time and how do we maintain our workforce and keep the skills in the area so 

we can do our mission. Because I think our facilities will recover much faster than the 

people are going to recover from the disaster. We have got to make sure that we’ve 

thought about what do we do about those people. I tell you a lot of lessons learned from 

what we did here. People that needed to be displaced went off to other centers and helped 

worked the mission of Stennis from other centers. I think that as soon as we can get 

people back in here, we are, but in addition to that, we’ve made arrangements to have a 

FEMA site built with RVs that our employees can get into it first and also the 

community. We’ve done a lot of things. I think we’re going to capture those lessons 

learned in an After Action Report, and we’re capturing it in the Governor’s 

Commission’s Report on some of the things that we can do better to prepare ourselves,

and I think that those are the things that are highest on my list, but there are probably 

many, many other things that people need to consider in dealing with this kind of 

disaster. It just doesn’t end when the hurricane is a 100 miles away. It continues if it has 

really done the devastation that we’ve seen with Katrina. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: It’s been three months and we’re still continuing. Anything else 

that you can think of that we haven’t talked about that you might want to touch on?

BILL PARSONS: Well, the people that ran the Emergency Operations Centers across 

this agency, especially here at Stennis and MAF just did an outstanding job. The ride-out 

crews worked. It helped sustained our facilities and keep them where they could be 

brought back up both at MAF and Stennis. So, again it tells you that this agency, this 

Gulf Coast, the New Orleans area is not about our product or our mission as much as it is 

about our people. It is what our people do. So, again, I go back saying they just did a 

fantastic job. If we will take care of them, they, we, will take care of the mission and 

what we have to do as an agency. So, I’m just proud to be part of it. 

PAUL FOERMAN: One more thing... (Inaudible)

BILL PARSONS: Satellite phones. That was a big lesson learned. We lost all 

communications. We lost our telephone systems. In the meantime, Marshall which is 

kind of the networking center, brought in satellite phones and coordinated through 

Headquarters. A gentleman named Bill Bounds was the communications expert at 

Headquarters. He coordinated his assets throughout the agency, brought them to Marshall 
9

and brought them all down here. The satellite phones were instrumental to establishing 

early communications. Eventually we got the phone systems back up. We had a FEMAtrained NASA Incident Commander from AMES that came down here, Bob Oplinger and 

Bob showed up here and he was able to speak FEMA Incident Command Center 

language and so we sent him over there to coordinate things. We could use a few more of 

those folks in the agency when we are dealing with this kind of situation because you’ve 

got to be able to speak their language. Turns out that they’re modeled a lot after a military 

unit, a Marine Corp Unit. So, when you sit there, and you go in there and you start 

looking at them, if you have a military background, you can catch on pretty quick, but we 

need people trained in emergency response and incident command structure that FEMA 

uses for these early responses. We had somebody. Bob came from AMES and did that. In 

those early days, the only transportation we could use to get here was aircraft. There was 

no way to drive into here. Get aircraft in here and get helicopters over to MAF and we 

brought air bosses. People that can control aircraft and plan that from over at the Johnson 

Space Center. Again, we utilized all these different expertise and skills throughout this 

agency. Scott Reagan and I can’t remember the second gentleman’s name came over 

from JSC and ran our air assets for a couple of weeks. You couldn’t have been able to do 

all this without this agency sending in those skills and those special equipment that we 

needed to do the recovery with. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: That’s good.

PAUL FOERMAN: Yes, very good.

(End of Interview)