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Profiles in Enrichment tells the stories of USEC employees who have made great contributions to the company or our local communities.
Mike MacCrae has 30 years of nuclear plant construction experience, but his latest projects have included rebuilding homes on the Gulf Coast. In the near future, he will be helping to build a new facility for his home church, Bethesda Christian Church in Waverly.
Mike MacCrae, Quality Assurance Manager for American Centrifuge Plant Operations at Piketon, has many years of construction experience under his belt. He has been a general contractor for home construction, a radiographer in a navy shipyard, and he has worked on the construction of three nuclear power plants.
However, MacCrae will tell you that his most important construction projects came in 2006 and 2007 when he traveled to the Gulf Coast to help Hurricane Katrina victims rebuild their homes and their lives.
In January 2006, MacCrae traveled to Ocean Springs, Miss., with the Buckeye Baptist Builders as the relief efforts at that time were just getting underway more than four months after the hurricane had hit.
Upon his arrival, MacCrae was shocked at what he found. “I was surprised to see the number of people that had been displaced from their homes,” he said. He and a group of 50 men were stationed at Belfountain Baptist Church. While they were there, they found themselves building a new roof on the church, which suffered damage during the storm. Most of the homes they encountered were damaged by as much as eight feet of water – as far inland as two miles. MacCrae’s group worked on three homes that experienced severe water damage, replacing dry wall and performing finish work.
During his 2007 mission trip to Lake Shore, Miss., MacCrae works with fellow members of the Buckeye Baptist Builders to raise an outside wall on a new home construction.
A year later, MacCrae and his group returned to the Gulf Coast with a group of 125 men and found that relief efforts were much more organized. This time, they were stationed out of the former Lake Shore Baptist Church in Mississippi, located 30 miles east of New Orleans. Lake Shore experienced 26-foot ocean surges that wiped out homes as far as four miles inland.
MacCrae and his team worked together to sort and distribute donated goods, install new windows in a house being rebuilt from the ground up (on 10-foot high stilts this time), complete the first floor of a new two-story home and install dry wall in another home. More than a year after the storm, building supplies were still very hard to come by in this area, and impromptu modifications had to be made to the design of the homes based on what building materials were available.
MacCrae was impressed by the number of church groups from all over the country that had helped already -- “there were hundreds of t-shirts hanging from the ceiling of the makeshift dining hall at our base camp,” all bearing the names of the churches that had been to Lake Shore to help rebuild, he said. “I was overcome by the sheer volume of the outpouring of love demonstrated by Christians across America.”
Next, MacCrae will turn his attention closer to home as his home church in Waverly, Ohio, begins it own construction project. He sees it as an opportunity to continue the important work that took him to the Gulf coast. “Our church is a mission outreach to our community,” said MacCrae.