Astoria graduate departs to rebuild Kabul embassy

Published 4:00 pm Tuesday, April 1, 2003

High-profile engineering jobs are Mauro’s specialtyFollowing the war in Iraq it will be up to civilian engineers and humanitarian workers to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure following the weeks, and possibly months, of fighting that could destroy it.

That kind of work is already going on in Afghanistan where the U.S. military helped bring down the terrorist-supported government of the Taliban. Gary Mauro, 41, who graduated from Astoria High School in 1979, will leave for that nation’s capital, Kabul, Thursday to rebuild the U.S. embassy.

Mauro is an expert in such large engineering and construction projects and will be working for the Halliburton-owned business of Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR). Halliburton is the Houston-based oil services, engineering and construction company, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. That firm had been thought to be in the running for a $600 million contract to rebuild Iraq through the U.S. Agency for International Aid, and received some criticism for it because of its close ties to the current administration. Yet on Friday, Halliburton announced that KBR was not a contender for the Iraqi rebuilding contract.

While Mauro said he wouldn’t and couldn’t comment on if his company had any intentions of pursuing work in Iraq, he did say he is extremely proud to be heading off to Afghanistan. He said he’s excited to be part of the effort of bringing a U.S. presence to the nation as a honor to those who died fighting there following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“To be honest it’s the sense of adventure … and a patriotic component of planting the flag in an important part of the world,” he said when asked about why he’s taking the job.

And to be realistic, he also said overseeing the job will be a big step for his career.

Mauro will be working as the project planner to ensure everything goes smoothly from design to construction. It will be his job to coordinate what needs to be built – and when and to ensure the proper materials are there to get the job done.

To do that in an impoverished nation where most of the materials will have to be shipped in from other parts of the world, all while ensuring tight security, poses some definite challenges, but Mauro said he’s confident that the project should go smoothly.

Varied background

In 1988 Mauro had graduated from Portland State University and was waiting to join the Air Force to serve as a lieutenant. He was approached with a job offer with a Raytheon contractor working on a mobile service tower for Titan IV rockets at Tongue Point and that started his career in engineering in construction. He said the job gave him invaluable experience before being stationed at Vandenburg Air Force Base in Vandenburg, Calif.

Following his stint in the military, Mauro worked from 1991 to 1994 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken S.C. He said this is the Southeast’s equivalent of the Hanford facility in Eastern Washington. Mauro then went to work for the firm Jacobs Engineering to help plan the Yucca Mountain project. That project is a plan to store America’s spent nuclear fuel in a mountain in Nevada and Mauro said he worked on it for two years until 1996. That lead to several other engineering projects including working as a management consultant for the Korea Power Engineering Company in Seoul, South Korea, before he was offered the opportunity to join the project of rebuilding and strengthening U.S. embassies around the world in October 2002.

He had been working on U.S. Consulate in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when he was offered the job of rebuilding the Kabul embassy.

“These were high-profile projects, important to the country and I couldn’t resist,” he said.

Working in Kabul will mean leaving his wife of five years, Paula, in Astoria, but Mauro said after a life’s career of foreign and national jobs that goes with the territory. And even after a life spent working in such a diverse field, he said he still enjoys coming back.

“There’s no town like home town,” he said.