EAGLES WINGS FOUNDATION NEWS

Gardener Leads Effort In Floyd-Torn Bahamas
The Palm Beach Daily News – Oct. 5, 1999
By Ralph Schusler, Daily News Staff Writer

The 15 tons of lumber that have washed ashore in the past two weeks are not the only reminder Palm Beach has of the hammering the Bahamas took at the hands of Hurricane Floyd.

Local landscape architect Scott Lewis recently returned from a 10-day stint in the northern Bahamas, where he headed a relief effort aimed at returning a modicum of order and amenities to the ravaged Abacos islands.

The closest of the Bahamas to Palm Beach, the two islands and surrounding cays suffered Floyd’s frontal assault, with sustained winds of 155 mph and confirmed gusts of up to 216 mph, Lewis said. Tidal surges of 22 feet that accompanied the storm’s eye wall caused flooding that contributed $750 million worth of damage to the islands.

“It could have been us,” Lewis said, “and, if it were, the damage would have been in the billions.

“The storm wobbled and turned north at the last minute, but if it had gone due west it would have been a direct hit,” he said. “Imagine Palm Beach with 70 percent of its trees blown over, 90 percent of the foliage on the hedges and plants blown off, and 60 percent of the island covered with 2 to 3 feet of salt water.”

An unlikely candidate

Lewis, 42, a former school teacher who runs a gardening business, may have seemed an unlikely candidate to direct the relief operation, but his knowledge of the people and terrain and his experience as a fire-fighter enabled him to cobble together a credible response. Lewis was introduced to the Abacos at an early age by his late father, George, a real estate agent. Lewis also was a Palm Beach County volunteer firefighter for 20 years, serving as chief for eight years.

Unwittingly recruited to head the relief effort, Lewis wound up conferring with Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham and U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who has had a home in the Abacos for decades. Lewis led a force of more than 100 people, including 54 Bahamian Marines.

“It appears he did an excellent job, said Ken Elmore, Palm Beach’s Fire-Rescue chief. A Bahamian rescue official agrees.“He did a bang-up job,” said Norwel Gordon, chief of the Marsh Harbour volunteer fire rescue service, who coordinated the relief effort from West Pam Beach. “Scott basically took over control.”

It all began mid-morning on Saturday, Sept. 18, when Lewis was about to take his kids to a soccer game. Long-time friend Bill Perry said two fire chiefs from the Bahamas – Gordon and son-in-law, Clay Wilhoyte, who heads the Hope Town fire department on Elbow Key – had called him asking for aid. Perry asked if Lewis could help out.

“I didn’t hesitate, Lewis said. “I told him ‘yes.’”

Within hours, Wilhoyte arrived in West Palm Beach in a Cessna seven-seater to pick up Lewis and a half dozen generators and chain saws. The aircraft added an eerie not to the trip, since it was the same model Lewis’ brother, Jim, had been flying in when he and six others were lost in a storm off Palm Beach in 1976.

The man in charge

Upon arrival Saturday evening, Lewis toured Hope Town, Great Abaco, and met with the fire staff for three hours, then set up what he called the secret of his success: an “incident command structure” he had learned about during training at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsberg, Md.

Developed by the National Wildlife Protection Agency in Boise, Idaho, the “paramilitary structure,” as Lewis described it, ensures efficiency and effectiveness in dealing with disasters.

Everybody knows who to get their directions from, and it becomes more of a team than an individual effort,” Elmore explained. “It keeps people from getting lost and free-lancing, going off on their own and getting in over their heads or doing overlapping jobs. Without that kind of system installed, any emergency command is extra difficult and makes for a chaotic situation.”

Lewis said he established 14 groups to deal with matters ranging from structural evaluation to security, from utilities to finance.

The effort was so well received that Wilhoyte recruited Lewis to travel with him by boat to Marsh Harbour, where he met Bahamian Rep. Robert Sweeting and did a damage assessment of the Abacos’ main island.

Sweeting, in turn, took Lewis to meet the island’s top official, District Administrator Everette Harte, who shuttled Lewis t the airport to meet the prime minister himself. Lewis said he suggested that Ingraham call in U.S. help from Federal Emergency Management Administration but ran up against Bahamian pride.

“He gave me a two-minute spiel and told me, ‘You take it over. You run it,’” said Lewis. “Then he assigned me a military contingent of 54 Bahamas Defense Force Marines.”

That put Lewis in charge of 31 communities with more than 11,000 residents spread out over a narrow 130-mile island and surrounding cays.

So began a grueling string of 20-hour work days interspersed by bouts of sleep on the living room floor of one resident’s home. Lewis lived on sandwiches and went a week without a hot meal, he said. With no running water around, he washed by taking “Navy baths.”

Still, his hardships paled in comparison with those he witnessed and tried to assuage, such as:

■ flooding in the Haitian communities of The Mud and Pigeon Pea, where people had to wade through knee-deep sewage. Lewis had huge quantities of antibiotics brought in to prevent outbreaks of hepatitis, meningitis, typhus and cholera.

■ salt-water contamination of drinking water cisterns, which required the import of eight portable drinking-water carriers for six schools and the two Haitian communities.

■ shelter and sanitation for residents of the 300 homes that had been destroyed and the 350 that had suffered severe damage. Churches, for the most part, filled this bill, but Lewis arranged for the U.S. Army to provide 200 emergency tents, as well as dozens of portable toilets.

Close to 1,000 tons of supplies were flown into the island on private airplanes and DC-3s, and air traffic was so thick that planes were taking off with only a football field’s distance between them, said Lewis, who had to find someone to coordinate take-offs and landings. A Coast Guard C-130 transport plane brought a load of emergency tarps, while dozens of Palm Beach County companies with close contacts in the Abacos also came to their aid.

“We are still a little overwhelmed by the scope of assistance and are playing catch-up to find out who they all are,” said Gordon.

A fire broke out in Hope Town and three houses went up in smoke before a team of Palm Beach County firefighters put out the blaze. There residents joined the thousands of others forced from their homes by wind and rain.

“You can’t imagine having the front door and garage doors of your house burst in, then, after the integrity of your home has been violated, having the roof burst off so you have to go and stay with your neighbors,” said Lewis, still visibly moved by what he’d witnessed days after his return stateside on Sept. 28.

Moved to tears

Lewis said he was moved to tears a number of times while in the Abacos. One time occurred when he was invited to console a group of people huddled together for a Sunday church service in Cooperstown.

“I was trying to tell them that the outside world cared and that help was on the way,” Lewis said.

Steve Jerauld, battalion chief for the training and safety division of Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, went to Lewis’ aid toward the end of his stay to analyze and critique the command system and assist the scale-back operation.

“He found himself knee-deep in alligators,” said Jerauld, who has dealt with disasters for more than two decades.

Meeting the challenge

“It was one of the most challenging situations from a logistical point of view, since it’s a country spread out over islands, and given the loss of communications and the impossibility to get good communications – not to mention the political situation.

“We’re used to responding in neighboring jurisdictions and establishing the protocol you need to operate, but here you had a country separated from us by an ocean with a government hesitant to have us come in and do anything officially, so you had to do it unofficially.

“It’s just incredibly complicated to bring people from other jurisdictions in to provide assistance and ensure they don’t become a burden on people they’re trying to help,” Jerauld said. “That’s what happened with Hurricane Andrew, where people came charging down to help out but were ill-prepared and not self-sufficient, so the locals wound up providing assistance to people they were supposed to be turning to for assistance. They were well-meaning, but it led to chaos, and that was right here within our own country.

“The most amazing thing is that Scott was able to pull together a cross-section of the community and turn it into what I would consider a pretty efficient command staff of people without any background in coordinating emergency equipment and personnel, or dealing with logistical issues, as well as bringing in supplies – and all the while working within that confused political environment where the government doesn’t want any help but needs it desperately.”

Bahamians were equally impressed by Lewis’ efforts.

“Scott turned chaos into order,” said Jack Albury, owner of Albury’s Trucking, in Marsh Harbour. He organized and set in motion a relief committee and command center that really is putting Abaco back together.”

“He did a tremendous job of getting us out of the intensive care unit,” said Everette Harte, district administrator for the Abacos.