Child of the storm
Newborn, parents take shelter at Walmart parking lot after hurricane
PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Their home full of soggy furniture and mosquitoes, Wilmer Capps was desperate to find shelter for his wife and their son Luke, born just three days after Hurricane Michael ravaged the Florida Panhandle.
So Capps, his wife Lorrainda Smith and little Luke settled in for the longest of nights in the best spot they could find: The parking lot of a Walmart store shut down by the storm.
On a starry night, mother sat in the bed of the family’s pickup truck; her child sat in a car seat beside her.
Dad sat in the dark and pondered how it could be that his son’s first night out of a hospital could be spent outside a big-box retailer because of a lack of help.
“It really upset me, man, because I’ve always been the type of person who would help anyone,” Capps said in an interview with The Associated Press, which found the family outside the store Monday night.
Luke is healthy and so is Smith, his mom.
But she said her newborn deserves better than the stormy life he’s had so far.
“We had everything. Fulltime job, a place to live. One day we had it all, the next we had nothing,” said Smith. “
This is not what I thought
I’d be bringing him back to.”
The story of Luke’s birth is just one amid the chaos that life has become in areas of the Florida Panhandle hit hardest by Michael.
With the hurricane bearing down on their native home of Panama City, Capps and Smith sent their three other children to stay with relatives.
Doctors had planned to induce labour on Oct. 11, the day after Michael made landfall.
Smith went to the hospital as planned that day, but was turned away, so she walked
several kilometres home after being unable to find a ride back.
Anya Mayr, a Gulf Coast Regional spokeswoman, said the hospital has operated only as an emergency room and hasn’t admitted patients since Michael.
Labour pains started the next day, so Capps drove Smith to a hospital about 130 km to the north in Dothan, Alabama.
She gave birth at 1 a.m. last Saturday, three days after Michael’s landfall.