EAGLES WINGS FOUNDATION NEWS

Gardener brings order to relief effort
By Kimberly Miller
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 11, 2005

GULFPORT , Miss. — Scott Lewis rolled into this decimated Gulf Coast town one week ago as a gardener for Palm Beach's rich and famous. By Friday, folks here were calling him commander.

Some did so grudgingly. National Guard officers weren't sure they should take orders from a hammy civilian in a white polo shirt and khakis. Other paid recovery employees tried to get the 6-foot-2-inch West Palm Beach resident and founder of Eagles Wings Foundation Disaster Relief tossed out as leader of a 1,400-strong volunteer program that he talked his way into following Hurricane Katrina.

Damon Higgins/The Post

CIVILIAN COMMANDER: Scott Lewis coordinates volunteer relief efforts with a National Guard officer Friday at the Guard's command center in Gulfport, Miss.

Damon Higgins/The Post

EARLY RISER: Scott Lewis awakens at 5 a.m. Friday at the command center at a high school in Gulfport, Miss., to plan the day's activities for volunteers helping victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Call it a clash of egos. Who will be king of the recovery?

But when you're in a town where there aren't enough adjectives to describe the damage and no storm cliché does justice to the destruction, rules and protocol are as fluid as the gulf waters that stole beachfront mansions Aug. 29.

It's one thing when fragile trailer homes are blown to bits. It's another when entire brick-and-mortar neighborhoods are nothing but front porch steps that dead-end in midair — the only thing remaining from a huge storm surge that left a 41-foot-tall watermark on a tree 1 mile inland.

"All the bureaucracies and boundaries are thrown out," said John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard. "The formality goes away, and you just roll up your sleeves and roll with the punches."

And listen to Scott Lewis.

"Please be as patient with me as you can with me being an ass," Lewis told volunteers during an early morning staff meeting. "I do have a style and it's rough, but it gets things done."

Locals help Guardsmen reach victims

Lewis, a former volunteer firefighter with 25 years of emergency management training, earned the nickname "Slick" before he was even in town a full day.

He showed up four days after Katrina and knocked on the door of the Harrison County Emergency Operations Center. Officials, dealing with their own tragedies from the storm, were immersed in what they now describe as "controlled chaos."

No one had asked Lewis to come. They made him wait a half-hour.

But after hearing an oral résumé, including Lewis' 1999 experience helping with Hurricane Floyd in the Bahamas, Chancery Clerk John McAdams made him the leader of the Harrison County volunteer program.

Now he needed an office. Lewis headed to school district headquarters and walked into a meeting with the superintendent and a handful of principals. He talked his way into the Harrison County High School off Highway 49, then went to the National Guard staging area.

"I said, 'I want to talk to someone big,' " Lewis said. "Ten minutes later, we were with the battalion commander."

By the end of last Saturday, he had a commitment for 800 troops at his command post to work with volunteers searching for pockets of Harrison County residents not yet reached by aid.

He calls the program "pathfinder" — a way for locals to help Guardsmen who don't know the area reach the most isolated or off-the-map residences. Lewis boasts it's the first time that civilians have partnered with military so closely, including taking direction from them. Goheen couldn't prove him wrong.

"That environment down there has forced people to get very ingenious," Goheen said.

Within two days, the pathfinder program found more than 400 people with various needs, from blood pressure medication to boys' underwear. But doctors warn of more severe illnesses brewing — cholera and even bubonic plague. Free tetanus shots were being offered all over the county. Lewis keeps track of the calls with a database spreadsheet so he can report each night at 7 to other emergency managers who gather at the EOC for a briefing.

While some of the people at those meetings joke about Lewis' "big personality" and how he'd be a great thespian, they're also mostly grateful for the task he's undertaken. Organizing hundreds, possibly thousands by today, of bighearted but disorganized volunteers is a tough job.

Plus, this weekend, he was even fighting national directives from relief organizations asking people not to volunteer. They don't want thousands of people coming into the area when they are still trying to evacuate New Orleans. There are no hotel rooms between New Orleans and Tallahassee . Too many volunteers in a disaster zone can become its own disaster.

Still, Lewis got on the radio Friday night and asked for people to come to Gulfport .

Lewis "picked up the ball, ran with it and has scored touchdowns," said Lt. Jim Troiano, a spokesman for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office who was in Gulfport helping with recovery.

'I told him he should be president'

Last year, Lewis worked in Arcadia after Hurricane Charley and locally with Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances.

"It was the same thing then. Everyone looking to him," said Luis Rojo, who works with Lewis at his gardening company, Scott Lewis Gardening and Trimming. "I told him he should be president or something."

Lewis formed his not-for-profit disaster recovery company following Hurricane Floyd and the death of his father from lung cancer in 1995. He sat by his dad's bedside and talked about the important things in life. Family and helping people became his top priority. For 10 years, he had taken no more than three-day weekends for vacations and was a self-confessed control freak.

"I didn't give my trust to my guys," Lewis said about his 25-man yard maintenance crew.

He also became more religious, turning his annual church visit to a weekly ritual.

Another issue that has fueled his spirituality, he said, is a well-publicized 10-year court battle that pits Lewis against a woman to whom he once sold his business. Under the sale agreement, Lewis said he would not compete with her on Palm Beach and that she could keep the name of the company. But problems with consulting and commission fees ruined the arrangement, and Lewis went back into business for himself on Palm Beach .

On Friday, that court fight may as well have been a million miles away.

Lewis woke at 5 a.m. on a 5 1/2-foot turquoise couch in a teacher staff room turned logistics room.

He needed to plan for what he hoped would be 7,000 volunteers streaming into the county. The ones already there were sleeping in tents outside the school and in trailers they've hauled from hometowns all over the continent — Canada, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida , Virginia, North Carolina. The Scientology Disaster Relief team already was set up on the grass near the gymnasium, and a 100-member medical team was on its way, Lewis said. From where?

"I don't know, I'm not even sure what day it is. I didn't know until yesterday that Rehnquist died," Lewis said of the late U.S. Supreme Court chief justice.

And on Friday, he still needed gas. A man offered to sell him 80 gallons.

"Offer him $200," Lewis told a volunteer.

"What do I do? I've got chain saws, a tractor with a bucket and a backhoe," said Horace Clemmons, a Jackson County, Ala., resident who wandered in early Friday to the principal's office where Lewis had set up his headquarters.

"We'll get you with someone," Lewis said.

"I'm a paramedic from California," one man said.

"We've got a medical triage set up out front," another woman added.

People need to stop dropping off clothes (there's way too many), the Guardsmen want recycling bins, and someone should direct the increasing traffic into the school grounds.

"Right now, we're just trying to get an area out of the emergency room and into the recovery room," Lewis said of Gulfport .

Monday will mark Lewis' 10th day here. Ten days of 17-hour workdays.

He wants the county to appoint a full-time staff person to the volunteer effort, but as of Saturday, he had no idea when he'd be able to leave.

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