Tropical storm Bonnie tripped over the Florida peninsula and was battered by some upper level winds unfriendly to storm development. It dropped to a tropical depression and broke up into a bunch of windy rain squalls. So the Gulf dodged a bullet. This one at least. It caused me to remember talking with a guy who was watching over his kids out on a pier about a week ago.
He is a battalion fire chief from a little town farther north in Mississippi. I asked him his thoughts on the Gulf oil spill from a visitor's perspective. He said things were obviously catastrophic for the tourism business. He said that you go to the casinos and you’ll see people sitting at the gaming tables or at the slots. There will be one person then six or seven empty chairs before there’s someone else. He said that when you see that, you know it’s bad.
I asked him if he thought there were any comparison between the BP spill and Katrina. About a week earlier, a few folks from Thibodaux, Louisiana told me that there were some in their view. and he said that there’s really no comparison. He wasn’t in Louisiana but up in his home town after Katrina and dealing as best as he could with the aftermath. His take was that after the BP rig blew they had a chance to prepare for this because it was almost two months before any oil arrived on the Mississippi shores. Katrina was different because the storm’s path was really all over the place, leaving those who actually ended up in its path only two days to prepare for it.
He told two stories about Katrina. There’s a 2000 acre storage fuel facility near his area. After the storm hit there, there was an order that went out from the President Bush that the top priority was to get that facility back as quickly as possible. The reason why was that facility supplied the lion’s share of fuel for the eastern half of the United States. That facility had to be put back on line as quickly as possible or the disaster in the Gulf was going to spread to a big part of the country in the form of fuel shortages. That facility held gasoline, diesel and natural gas.
The town the Chief calls home is in a rural area and a lot of its residents living out in the countryside. Now, a lot of those rural residents were shut ins who rely others to deliver the things they need. After Katrina, what they needed most was water and ice. The need for water is obvious, but ice was equally important because many of those folks relied on medication to stay alive and those medications, such as insulin, had to be refrigerated. He didn’t have enough vehicles in his department’s fleet or people on his staff to deliver those life sustaining supplies on a regular basis. But small town America does what it’s always done. The people volunteered their vehicles and time to make the needed runs.
Although he didn’t say it directly, I inferred from his description of events that the town’s commercial gas stations couldn’t pump fuel because they had no power. The fire department had its own supply of gasoline and diesel for its vehicles and a generator to run the pumps. So when the volunteers came in to make their life sustaining deliveries, he’d give them each ten gallons of gas. Being responsible, he kept a log of all the fuel given out and the people to whom he gave it. Once the clean up in the region got going and the main roads were open for travel, representatives from the federal government came in to “help”. I’d guess it was FEMA but he didn’t specify. When the feds saw what he was doing, they objected. They said that he was misappropriating government property by doling out that fuel. The Chief said, okay. Then he went out and got some paper and Magic Markers and made up a bunch of signs that said something like “Official Emergency Disaster Relief Vehicle” and affixed them to his volunteers’ cars and trucks with Duck Tape, because that was the only kind of tape he had.
That wasn’t enough to satisfy the feds so he went into his storage room and found a bunch of emergency vehicle lights and gave them to his volunteers to mount to their cars and trucks. He said he had no idea if any of the lights actually worked, but he thought it might convince the feds that the cars and trucks were about as officially part of the Fire Department’s relief effort as he could make them. The federal people still maintained that what he was doing was against the rules.
That tore it for him. He turned to the feds and said, “Fine. If you don’t like it put me in jail. When I’m in there you’re going to have to give me food and water and air conditioning because you have generators in the jails. If you want to do that, go ahead. Until you do, I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing. I would much rather give these people some gas so they can deliver this ice and water that our people need to stay alive than send out a truck to take away dead bodies.”
I don’t know for certain because he never said, but I suspect that ended that complaint straight away.
The Chief also talked about a father and son who came down to Waveland to help out after the storm. The father was a Viet Nam veteran who’d apparently been in the thick of it over there. He never talked about it but it was understood that he had seen some rough stuff over there.
Once the pair was done working in Waveland and they were heading back, the father turned to his son and said, “That was the worst thing I have ever seen.”
One cannot wonder what these people who live down here are made of that they live through disaster after disaster but refuse to leave their home. They hunker down to stay safe during the storms, then they come together to help each other rebuild… to reclaim their home and their communities. I’d call it grit and what the fictional Senator Jefferson Smith said, “a little looking out for the other guy.”
I’m an generally an optimist so I’d like to think that’s what Americans do when their friends, families, communities or country is in need of help. To me, that’s more valuable than any check someone might write to a relief charity somewhere. It’s just one of the things that makes America an exceptional and remarkable country.
NOTE: I know the Chief's name and town, but I didn't want to use it in this story because I never asked his permission so the name and place are withheld to protect the innocent and the resourceful.
Update: Edited for formatting only on 9/24/10
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