Devastation haunts team of rescuers
Volunteers find distributing food, water, ice more critical than damage assessment
They found countless homes without doors, windows or roofs — just random parts of the interiors left.
Crowds of people held signs pleading for emergency help. A building blazed unattended.
The devastation of Hurricane Michael astonished a group of Broward County volunteers who traveled to the Panhandle to help.
“This is something you remember for the rest of your life,” said Annette Neice, 56, a Cooper City resident.
Five Broward volunteers and two Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue officers left Fort Lauderdale for the devastated Panhandle on Oct. 11 while Michael was still roaring through Georgia.
The volunteers, part of the Community Emergency Response Team, drawn from across Broward, had planned on doing damage assessment, but it quickly became clear that distributing food, water and ice was more urgently needed.
Before returning, they estimated they distributed about 5,000 meals to isolated areas as far west as Port St. Joe, about 12 miles south of where Hurricane Michael made landfall on Mexico Beach.
Some of the survivors hadn’t seen anyone from outside their community until the bright green rig, a
repurposed ambulance from Broward, pulled up, loaded with ice, water and meals ready to eat, they said. The storm was three days gone by that time.
“We heard someone say, ‘Thank God for ice, it’s going to keep the baby formula cold,’” said Mark Miller, 69, assistance operations chief for the Fort Lauderdale emergency response team, retired to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea from operating a private school company. “It turns out, there was a month-old baby there.”
Miller and his team, back from their first disaster deployment ever on Wednesday, returned with the scenes of the ravaged region still vivid.
“For miles and miles and miles, you see complete forests bent over,” said Bill Johansen, 73, a volunteer who retired from financial services to Lauderdale-bythe-Sea.
More teams are following these volunteers.
Thursday, the Broward County Sheriff ’s Office sent 25 personnel to help with law enforcement for a week. They were relieving a group from the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office that had gone ahead to help with law enforcement in the Panhandle. The Fort Lauderdale Fire Department also sent a team of firefighters to carry out search and rescue in Mexico Beach in the first days after the storm stilled.
Fort Lauderdale’s volunteer team was the second of nine Community Emergency Response Teams to respond to the disaster over the past week since 155 mph winds pounded the Panhandle. It was the organization’s biggest deployment ever, said Christy Rojas-Kasten , Volunteer Florida’s CERT Program Manager, coordinating the teams’ deployment and efforts in the field.
Their grueling itinerary attracted the admiration of the troops back in Broward.
“This completely voluntary team is absolutely amazing,” Fort Lauderdale Battalion Chief Stephen Gollum said.
As they traveled toward the epicenter of Hurricane Michael’s devastation, they saw miles of downed trees and neighborhoods flattened.
Neice said the people they encountered looked to be sweating and suffering — until the doors of their rig opened.
“This lady came running up and gave each and everyone a hug,” she recalled.
Some of the survivors told the Broward crew they hadn’t eaten.
“They were like little kids following Santa Claus,” Miller said, recalling the reaction the converted ambulance drew.
But the crew had to be cautious about going too far from where they knew there was gas.
The Broward contingent was based in Tallahassee, fanning out to Liberty County and Calhoun County. Nightly, they returned to a Florida A & M University field house, that had been converted to accommodate about 400 cots for the hurricane helpers drawn from the National Guard and other community response teams. The spare accommodations did not keep them from falling asleep, they said.
“I was out before 10 p.m., Miller said.
But they were glad they had brought some materials from home, especially the old-fashioned paper maps. Most of the time, they had no GPS for directions.
Sometimes the scene grew surreal, Miller said. At one point, they were driving on a causeway and Miller, who was driving, noticed giant boulders were not on the seaward you’d expect.
“They had been pushed over to the other side of the road,” he said. side as