alafarmnews

In the Aftermath of Katrina,Two Co-ops Band Together to
Help a Third

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, just six days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Ron Barnes, who heads communications and marketing for Coast Electric Power Association in Bay St. Louis, MS, stood near the warehouse dock at his Kiln, MS, district office watching as volunteers unloaded a Bonnie Plant Farm truck from Greenville, AL, packed with storm relief supplies. Kiln is located about 12 miles off Interstate 10, west of Biloxi and Gulfport. It is less than 60 miles from New Orleans.

“It means people still love us. It’s a blessing,” he said. Then his eyes widen and his obviously tired and weary face is able to give way to a smile when he hears that on the truck are gallons of homemade chili from Linda Horn, marketing director for Pioneer Electric Cooperative in Greenville.Earlier that day,

Justin Faulk, Bonnie Plant Farm route manager, and Ted Tindal, board member of Alabama Farmers Cooperative, Quality Co-op Inc., and Pioneer Electric Co-op, help load a Bonnie Plant Farm truck that Justin drove to hurricane ravaged Kiln, Mississippi, to the empolyees of Coastal Electric Co-op who had their lives torn apart by the storm.

Pioneer Electric Co-op employees and folks from Greenville and the surrounding community pitched in to load the Bonnie Plant Farm truck that had been sent to deliver the supplies. Justin Faulk, Bonnie Plant Farm route manager normally stationed in Athens, AL, had stepped up to bat to drive the truck and Terry Wilhite, communications director for Pioneer Electric Cooperative in Greenville, had volunteered to ride with him to help and document what happened on the trip. Part of this article is taken from Mr. Wilhite’s account of the trip.

According to AFC board member and Quality Co-op, Inc. board president, Ted Tindal, “It was like one Co-op took the initiative to help victims of hurricane Katrina and another Co-op put wheels under it.

“The storm hit that Sunday and Monday. The following Friday we had our monthly AFC board meeting. By then, the authorities were allowing shipments of supplies in. Bonnie Plant Farm’s VP Dennis Thomas offered as many trucks and drivers as it would take to transport materials to the coast as soon as possible.”

Mr. Tindal, who also serves as a director on the board of Pioneer Electric Co-op, continued, “Linda Horne with Pioneer Electric in Greenville put out the word that the old Wicks Lumber building that is now owned by Southside Baptist Church would be used as the staging area for a mission to help some people working on the gulf coast of Mississippi at Coastal Electric Co-op. The ministerial association of Butler County then put a plea out by emailing everyone in their directory for help. Churches, civic clubs and concerned citizens came in from everywhere with items for shipment. News also spread by word-of-mouth and soon Wal-Mart and other stores were swamped with people buying goods for the trip south. If people weren’t buying stuff for the trip, they handed whatever money they had to spare; 10, 20, 50, and 100 dollar bills went to the people who were buying. It was really and truly inspiring to see people wanting to help the way they did.”

Justin Faulk said that he had realized immediately after Katrina that Bonnie Plant Farm was in a slow part of the year for plant deliveries and that trucks were available to haul supplies. That’s when he heard that Dennis Thomas was thinking the same thing. He immediately offered his services. According to Justin, “That following Saturday, Dennis (Thomas) called to see if I was willing to go the next day and I agreed to be there with a truck.

“The first trip we made there was with a regular sized delivery truck. We mainly took food

products like canned goods, Gatorade, peanut butter, water, granola bars and snack food along with diapers. A friend of mine, Justin Green, went with me the second trip. He’s from the Union Springs area and is also a salesman for Bonnie in Oklahoma. We took a larger tandem truck that trip. The Feds waived most Department of Transportation weight regulations to relief drivers during the disaster so I got a form that allowed us to load the truck like we needed to. This trip involved hauling more baby clothes, diapers, adult clothing, shoes, sleeping bags and pillows. The folks in Greenville even sorted the baby clothes according to size and gender. The first trip was a tester to see what they really needed. We found that they had plenty to eat and that they needed something to wear.

“Everybody worked together in Greenville to get the trucks loaded. Ms. Linda Horne at Pioneer Electric did a good job of keeping everyone on the same page and seemed to be the one running the show. I take my hat off to her. And Mr. Ted (Tindal) was there with his wife to help load the trucks. They did a good job of getting supplies and keeping the people there, and in the community, pepped up.

“We went to Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian and Waveland but we were staged in a little town

“I don’t know if you heard that the President said it looked like a bomb had hit, but it’s the truth. It’s absolutely blown to pieces…mud and debris was everywhere…it was catastrophic. Cars and trucks washed three miles down the road where the surge came up…houses washed off of their foundations out into the highway. Some of the people there said it looked like a mini-tsunami coming at them. Nasty, black stinking mud knee deep was everywhere. The guy from the Electric Co-op that we dealt with the most, Ron Barnes, described it best when he said it smelled like sewage and death. The stench was horrible.

“It was just a week after the hurricane hit and traffic was still terrible. The bridge on Highway 90 from Pass Christian to Bay St. Louis was completely wiped out except for the pylons. This man and woman sat there at the end of the bridge. They said they had no family, no money, no job and had nowhere to go after losing their house and belongings to the storm. You ran across a lot of that.

“People stranded there were set up in tents. For instance, there was a big K-Mart parking lot, the store itself was gone, where several hundred people were living in a tent city. Some people didn’t have tents and were sleeping under tarps or whatever else they could find to get under.

“Soldiers and military vehicles were everywhere. There were people from the sheriff’s department, state troopers, and the regular police. There were Army helicopters flying in and out.

“It was about twelve miles from the beach where we delivered the supplies in Kiln and the water looked to have gotten a couple of feet deep. Water levels eight or ten miles inland were waist high. Where we got off the highway, you could tell by the debris line that the water had gotten several feet deep there and we were nearly five miles from the beach. They said the initial surge where it made landfall was more like thirty feet high. Everything down there is ruined. There’s nothing down there worth salvaging. They’ll have to start all over again. If the salt water or wind didn’t get it, the mud got it.

“There were boats in trees. I’d never seen anything like that before. At one car dealership, cars were stacked on top of cars. Pieces of sheds and houses up in trees; those huge signs advertising the casinos were twisted off at the ground; trees that it would take two people to reach around are just twisted off and tossed and every other tree down there has the leaves knocked off it. The salt water has killed most everything else green.

“We weren’t the only drivers to go from Bonnie. Several churches in Union Springs also sent loaded Bonnie trucks. We had Richard Brooks who is normally stationed in South Carolina went to Mobile; Chuck Roton from South Carolina and Brad Driggers who is normally stationed in North Carolina went to Ocean Springs, MS; Bobby Cole and Matt Green, who are normally in the New York area, went to Bayou La Batre, AL; and Terry Briggs, a Bonnie straight haul driver who would normally deliver supplies anywhere in the country, went to Baton Rouge, LA.

“I wanted to do it and I’m glad I got a chance to do it. I don’t like to call it volunteering my time. I really don’t know how to put it…I was giving my time in a way that I don’t ever want it to have to be paid back to me.” Justin ended pensively, “People see this thing on TV and you know it’s bad news and you feel sorry for the people. Trust me, you really don’t know how awful it is until you see it first hand and speak with some of the people who went through it. It’s so much worse in real life than it is on television. The couple of thousand people I saw down there were just shell-shocked…you could see it in their eyes. It’s hard for me to describe how they felt because I can’t imagine how it is to lose everything I own. Ron Barnes had sent his wife and kids to a relatives house in Florida then brought a few days worth of clothes to the Electric Co-op that Sunday morning, knowing that he would be there for a few days with the power outages that come with hurricanes. He has been employed there for eighteen years. Everything he had worked night and day for – his home, his vehicles, a place for his kids to grow up – was destroyed in less than six hours. He told me that he went to where his home had been the next day and there was only a concrete slab left. He said he collapsed in his front yard and just cried for several hours. It’s hard for me to comprehend and it gives me chill bumps to think about it. It just saddens me. I can’t imagine how those people feel. I don’t know if I could handle it as well as they are…it’s a terrible, terrible thing they’ve been through."