To hear Susan Rees tell it, her groundbreaking career with the Corps of Engineers, which included leading critical recovery work after Hurricane Katrina, was nothing special. Two major coastal Alabama environmental groups have made a point of disagreeing.
The relationship between the Corps and environmentalists can be contentious, so it stands out that the two groups recently honored Rees, who retired in early 2019 after a 38-year stint with the Corps’ Mobile District. In December, she received a “recognition of service” from the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program’s annual breakfast. On Jan. 31, the Alabama Coastal Foundation (ACF) honored her with its Lifetime of Conservation Achievement Award, whose short list of past recipients includes luminaries such as E.O. Wilson and Ann Bedsole.
As Rees was presented with the ACF award, in the form of a custom sculpture by Bruce Larsen, ACF Board President Rebecca Dunn Bryant explained that the honor was personal as well as professional.
“She was selected for this award not only because of her public and behind-the-scenes leadership, in terms of coastal planning and environmental restoration, community resilience and sustainable development, but also because she’s been a role model to so many of us,” Bryant said.
At the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program’s breakfast, its director, Roberta Swann, said Rees had “demonstrated to us the value of stick-to-it-ness.” George Crozier, who as longtime head of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab was a leader in research on the region’s marine ecosystems, said she “led the way in so many areas, for the Corps.”
“Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that when you went to the Corps in 1978, it was extraordinarily rare to be a biologist,” Crozier said. “There weren’t that many. The Corps was full, as it should have been, of engineers, and appreciation of what the biology in the region meant was something that was somewhat lost upon the engineers.”
He continued, “There weren’t that many women practicing science or engineering in the Corps. So I think as a pioneer, as long ago as that was, it’s extraordinarily important to recognize what she brought to the Corps.”
Rees came to coastal Alabama in 1975, fresh from earning her doctorate in marine science at the University of South Carolina. She said that while her specialty was biology, she’d come through a multidisciplinary program that gave her a broad appreciation of the marine environment, including aspects such as currents, sediments, tidal effects and geology. Though employed by the University of Alabama, she was stationed at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, where her duties included serving as director of graduate students.
Ironically, the opportunity to work for the Corps came about through a hiring freeze. That lockdown, called by Ronald Reagan after his inauguration in early 1981, left the Corps’ Mobile District in a bind. It had lost someone who had been leading a study of the Mississippi Sound, and needed to fill the vacancy to move on.
The study was in itself something unusual, Rees said.
“If you look at the structure of the Corps historically, the Districts didn’t do a whole lot of science. It was more, Congress said, ‘Go out and build this,’” she said. “For some reason the leadership in the Mobile District was very different. They took a hard look and said, ‘We don’t know a whole lot about the environment that we’re working in.”
There was a loophole in the hiring freeze: Because Rees worked for a state entity, the University of Alabama, she was able to go to work for the Corps under an inter-agency agreement between the state and the Corps. Essentially she was on loan, but when the hiring freeze ended that’s where she stayed.
“Just by having that [multidisciplinary] background, I was able to come in, and I knew enough about engineering or physics that I could talk to a lot of different folks,” she said.
She worked as a physical scientist and oceanographer before becoming the chief of the District’s Coastal Environment Section in 1996. In 2006, she became the program manager for the District’s Coastal Resilience Program and the Mississippi Coastal Improvements Program, which guided post-Katrina recovery strategies along the Gulf Coast. That work earned her the Corps’ 2010 Lt. Gen. John W. Morris Civilian of the Year Award.
As she has done with her more recent honors, Rees firmly rejected the idea that she deserved sole credit. “Our team should have gotten that recognition,” she said. “Everything I’ve done has been a team effort.”
Rees recently agreed to sit down with AL.com for an interview looking back on her career:
Q: In his remarks at the NEP breakfast, George Crozier suggested that for the Corps to employ a biologist was unusual at the time, and you had to grapple with a culture focused on engineering concerns. Was that a challenge?
Rees: “When I got there they had a couple of biologists because all of the environmental laws were passed in the late ‘60s or ‘70s. … I guess I really get along with people. I like a challenge. As far as working with a lot of engineers, at that point in time, that was a challenge. Now, the younger ones that had started coming in, and it was fun working with them. Because they were still in the mode of wanting to learn stuff. … We just became such a multitalented group, and at the Corps it’s all about teamwork. We just kept doing different and innovative things.”
Q: What’s an example of that?
Rees: “We’d figure out how to work our way through things. We started what was called the ‘beneficial use program,’ which was looking at how do we use dredge material, which typically was considered waste, but how could we use it as a product? I mean, it’s dirt and it’s sand. And it smells bad. And it looks bad. But you can do different stuff with it. If you do it right, you can build wetlands with it. … It sort of became ‘How do we keep overcoming obstacles to do what we think is the right thing to do?’
“It was a fun job. I can’t say that enough. I enjoyed getting up on Monday morning and driving down Airport Boulevard to downtown and just working with the different people and teams I worked with.”
Retired Corps of Engineers biologist Susan Rees, left, receives a symbol of the Alabama Coastal Foundation's Lifetime of Conservation Achievement Award, a statue by Bruce Larsen presented by ACF Board President Rebecca Dunn Bryant. (Lawrence Specker | LSpecker@AL.com)Lawrence Specker | LSpecker@AL.com
Q: It sounds like an era when the culture was changing.
Rees: “It started at the very top. A lot of our district engineers went on to become chiefs of engineers. And then, the leadership in the Planning Division, they were really supportive of knowing stuff. A lot of them had been through the era of the Tenn-Tom Waterway. And I think that sort of changed their mindset, that we can’t just keep doing what we’ve bene doing for the past 150 years. Obviously we built a lot of dams. In the last 15 years, we’ve been tearing a lot of dams down.”
Q: You weren’t just a woman in science, you were one of few women in professional roles in the Corps. Was that a struggle?
Rees: “For me it was fine, because when I went through graduate school there were not many women in the disciplines that I was in. So my graduate compadres were all male. So I didn’t have any problem at all. When I started there were two other women there, one was an engineer and one was a biologist … Now I think it’s becoming more equal because there are more women in the professional fields. So the hiring pool is a whole lot bigger. The women that I did go to graduate school with all stayed in academics, and I think that’s what a lot of women did. But I was more of an outdoor type, I didn’t mind getting dirty. I was always into fixing stuff, you know, I helped my dad work on his car. It didn’t bother me to get dirty and greasy.”
Q: You were honored for your leadership of the rebuilding effort on the Mississippi coast after Katrina. How much have we learned from that storm?
Rees: “I think we have learned a lot. The recovery model after Frederic was: ‘Build it back the way it was.’ The recovery after Hugo in Charleston was build it back the way it was. A lot of the storms, that was sort of the approach that really the whole federal government took. And the local governments were trying to get their economies back. After Katrina we had to take a little bit of a pause. … We had to look at things a little differently. A lot of what we started doing with the Mississippi Coastal Improvements Program was not just fix it but make it to where it could withstand another Katrina.”
Q: For example?
Rees: “If you take seawall that was over at Bay St. Louis, it was a very low seawall, it was probably three or four feet high. It had been built after the 1916 hurricane, and then people built on top of it. We did a number of studies on what it would take to reduce the impact. Not prevent it, because you can’t prevent from a hurricane … but what would we have to do to reduce the impact of another 28-foot surge? So that seawall went from four feet to, I think, 14 feet, with a beach in front of it and a lot of other stuff. Then the state and the city came in and started requiring additional work for buildings around that area. It was a joint effort there.”
Q: Is the central Gulf Coast be in a better position for the next big storm?
Rees: “I think it is. There’s still a lot of things we could do. Part of our plan was a buyout of people that were within that 100-year flood plain. And we had a lot of people who were interested, but we never got the money to do that.”
Q: You’re retired, but what do you think will be the major concerns going forward?
Rees: “In my mind it’s not necessarily economic development but it’s man’s desire to be within X number of miles of the water. If you look at population growth, it’s not necessarily well planned. All the flooding issues we’ve been seeing lately, it’s because of development that was not thought out real well. And the Corps doesn’t have anything to do with that, but we end up having to take care of the aftermath. … Look at development right now out in west Mobile, where we live. It’s crazy. Totally crazy. And I don’t know if the infrastructure can take more of it. The state agencies are totally overwhelmed, the cities are overwhelmed, the county, they don’t have the staff to go out and look at stuff, and they rely on the developer. I think that’s the real big thing.
“Sea level rise is a major concern in the coastal areas. And not so much right along the Gulf Coast yet, but we can show you data that sea level is rising here in Alabama. We’ve got 150 years’ worth of records. But you look along the east coast: Norfolk floods at high tide, Charleston floods at high tide. God forbid we ever have a hurricane with a big surge come into south Florida. I mean, that’s going to be something that we’re not going to get over in a long time.”
Q: Many people still write off climate change and sea level rise as political issues, but you’re seeing them being addressed in the planning of very practical, conservative entities such as the Corps. Is the risk assessment of storm surges changing along with that?
Rees: “I don’t even know if it’s going to take a surge. Sea level is rising. Well, that water’s going to go somewhere. And it’s going to go into those low-lying areas that didn’t use to flood. I try not to get in the climate change debate, but I go to Alaska every year. We’ve seen the impacts of the climate changing. Glaciers that we saw 25 years ago are gone. All of that water is going into the ocean.”
Q: What change would you like to see?
Rees: “The science and the thought of the Gulf and our bays and estuaries being special needs to get put into the grammar school teaching system and it needs to move throughout. The Sea Lab has a program that’s aimed at students, but that’s just one. And there’s not a whole lot of research money that’s ever been focused into the Gulf.”
“A lot of it goes back to the lack of money for education, especially lower, kindergarten through high school, to instill in everybody who’s here the value of where we live.”
Q: What would you like people to understand about the Corps?
Rees: “We work for Congress and we work for the administration. Before ‘90s we did not have a mission relative to environmental benefits. Congress finally changed that, and we could recommend building wetlands and things like this, or using dredge material beneficially. Now, whether we got the money to do that, that was all in Congress. It wasn’t like the Corps controlled its own destiny.
“I think we we’re willing to listen. But we can’t always do exactly what you want. I guess what sometimes gets me a little riled up is that they’ll say this is research or science the Corps did, so we can’t trust it. Well, no. This is research that trained professionals oversaw. We’re going to tell you, here’s what the benefits are and here’s what the impacts are going to be. Then it’s sort of out of our hands as to whether it gets done or not.
“Don’t blame the Corps. We do what we’re told. We’re a damn good construction agency. It’s a fantastic place to work, especially Mobile District.”