Nonprofit groups loaded with crucial disaster-relief and medical supplies are parked at staging areas in Florida after Hurricane Milton, which was a Category 3 storm when it struck Florida’s Gulf Coast Wednesday night, spread destruction across the state.
Kelby Marlin, transportation director at Convoy of Hope, said the faith-based organization has two tractor-trailer loads of supplies at its staging area in Perry, Florida. That location could change depending on the hurricane’s trajectory.
Springfield, Missouri-based Convoy of Hope has been partnering with FedEx Corp.(FDX), for the past three years. Marlin said Memphis, Tennessee-headquartered FedEx flew two of its top truck drivers to Springfield to drive Convoy of Hope’s disaster-relief supplies to Florida. Scott Osborne, a 31-year trucking veteran who works out of the FedEx Freight terminal in Jackson, Mississippi, was behind the wheel of one of Convoy of Hope’s red Kenworths as he made his way to Florida.
FedEx Freight previously sent three drivers to haul provided hygiene kits, food, water and tarps to staging areas to help survivors in six Southeastern states that were devastated by Hurricane Helene. The Category 4 storm made landfall on Sept. 26, pounding Florida’s Gulf Coast, before churning its way inland, leaving a 500-mile path of devastation.
“Volunteer drivers are the backbone of our driving team. Especially during high-volume times like these,” Marlin told FreightWaves. “We are always in need of volunteers who believe in the mission of Convoy of Hope and have a passion and a skill for driving.”
The organization, founded in 1994, has delivered relief supplies to more than 250 million people over the past 30 years.
So far, Convoy of Hope has sent over 100 truckloads, and its volunteer drivers have delivered approximately 2.5 million pounds of supplies to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. In its daily briefing Thursday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency reported that 210 people have been confirmed dead in those states, with the number expected to rise in the coming days and weeks.
Global logistics giant FedEx has offered to send seven more drivers over the next few weeks to haul Convoy of Hope supplies, Marlin said, after the nonprofit group assesses the areas where relief supplies are most needed.
The organization is looking for volunteer truck drivers to haul relief supplies from its locations in Springfield as well as Sacramento, California, and a future location in Atlanta.
“Our team will remain out of harm’s way until the storm passes, then we will move in as quickly as possible to get relief supplies to people in need,” Marlin told FreightWaves. “Most of our volunteer drivers have responded to these kinds of natural disasters before, and like most truck drivers, who spend long periods in their trucks, are capable and prepared for these types of situations.”
Medical mobile units head to Florida
In the wake of the second major hurricane to strike Florida in less than two weeks, Lenexa, Kansas-based Heart to Heart International, a nonprofit medical and logistics organization, is preparing to send its advance teams to the state to coordinate with local, county, state and federal entities.
As of publication Thursday, Milton has been blamed for six deaths so far in Florida, including four in St. Lucie County and two in St. Petersburg.
Dan Neal, senior vice president of HHI, said its volunteer roster includes around 150 physicians, nurses and logistics professionals from across the country. He said HHI has enough medical personnel to operate multiple teams in different areas that are devastated by natural disasters.
“We’re just sort of on standby to see what’s happening with Milton. We don’t know where we will deploy yet,” Neal said.
While not all of its medical and logistics volunteers deploy at the same time, doctors and nurses typically work in teams of 10. For the past 13 days, HHI teams have been treating up to 30 victims of Helene each day in the hardest-hit parts of North Carolina using the organization’s 45-foot RV, which has been converted into a mobile doctor’s office. The medical vehicle comes equipped with two exam rooms, a pharmacy and bathroom facilities.
After Helene, HHI partnered with the Haywood County Department of Health and staged its mobile clinic just south of Asheville, North Carolina.
“We can take it anywhere around the country and pull it into a parking lot, open up the door, and treat those with non-life-threatening medical conditions or those in need of their blood pressure medication, insulin, or treat cuts, minor injuries, even poison ivy, to ease some of the pressure from hospitals’ emergency rooms,” Neal told FreightWaves.
The mobile clinic doesn’t have an X-ray machine, and those needing oxygen are referred to a nearby hospital. Neal said HHI medical volunteers can fill patients’ daily medications for a short term or around 30 days as most of the pharmacies in the hardest-hit areas of some states are still closed or gone.
Many Helene survivors lost their medications as they rushed to evacuate during the devastating flooding and mudslides that left 88 people dead in western North Carolina, according to FEMA. That number is expected to rise. Some rural communities are still cut off from emergency personnel getting to them as hundreds of roads and bridges were wiped out after Helene dumped 17 to 31 inches of rain in some communities in the Appalachian Mountains, according to the National Weather Service.
Hurricane aftermath
Respiratory illnesses are on the rise in western North Carolina as Helene survivors return to formerly flooded homes that are now filled with mud because they have nowhere else to stay, Neal said.
“Now, it’s October and it’s getting cool at night in the Smoky Mountains and there’s mold developing in their homes, and folks are also lighting fires to stay warm at night,” Neal said. “With the smoke and mold, we’re seeing a lot of respiratory illnesses.”
Ingrid Brown, a 45-year trucking veteran, lives in Zionville, North Carolina, which borders Tennessee. As Helene headed toward Florida on Sept. 26, Brown said she was delivering freight near Tampa and was picking up another load of refrigerated produce near Plant City, Florida, to deliver near Memphis.
Despite receiving news reports from family members who live near her farm in Zionville that the area was getting slammed by torrential rainfall, mudslides and flooding, Brown said she had to force herself to focus on delivering her load and navigate traffic jams as Florida residents scrambled to flee Helene before she could think about the damage to her farm.
“Working and driving is a completely different world than being at home and seeing this devastation happening and not being able to do anything about it,” Brown told FreightWaves. “I haven’t really been able to talk about this before. It’s just so sad. I have to stay busy.”
Brown said she wasn’t able to see the storm damage to her farm until days later because all the main and back roads to her home were washed out. She and five other families on Rich Mountain still don’t have electricity.
While her roof sustained damage from fallen trees and a bedroom on the first floor of her house flooded, Brown said things could have been much worse. Brown, who is 63, said her family has lived on Rich Mountain their entire lives.
“I am lucky that I have my life and a place to go home to because many people here do not,” she told FreightWaves. “I can’t imagine losing my life because I was trapped by water with no way out. All of the roads around here follow the creeks and rivers. Bridges that have been here forever are completely gone.”
She also volunteered and delivered pallets of water and bags of ice to neighboring communities in western North Carolina.
After meeting with her insurance adjuster on Monday to survey the damage to her roof and property, Brown said she couldn’t sit still long because one of her customers was in the crosshairs of Milton’s path and asked if she could drive down and pick up a final load of produce before the hurricane hit.
A former owner-operator, Brown now drives for Blackjack Express of Proctor, Arkansas. She runs its only refrigerated trailer while the carrier’s remaining fleet of around 25 drivers haul heavy equipment and oversize loads.
“I asked the owners if I could deadhead about 750 miles to take care of this customer before Hurricane Milton hit and potentially wiped them out of business and off the map and they said, ‘Of course. Do what you need to do,’” Brown said. “It’s just not in my nature to sit still and not try to help and take care of people and my customers if I can.”
Ingrid Brown’s cousin, Steve Brown, who also lives in Zionville, is using his own backhoe and excavating equipment to build culverts on roads washed out by massive flooding so that emergency vehicles can get to some residents previously surrounded by water.
“Steve, who is more like my brother to me and takes care of my property when I’m on the road, is using his own money to buy the supplies and fuel for his equipment to build these culverts and open these roads for some of these people,” Brown said.
After picking up her load of produce near Tampa, Brown said it took her eight hours to go 200 miles as thousands of motorists and their families attempted to evacuate before Milton struck.
Brown said families in her area were being stung by yellowjacks after their underground nests were flooded during Helene, which was confirmed by The Associated Press.
“Folks back home are having a heck of a time finding EpiPens or allergy medication because the stores and pharmacies are closed.”
Neal confirmed that HHI’s mobile medical clinic carries EpiPens after a situation years earlier when a man who was repairing power lines in another disaster area was stung and had a severe allergic reaction.
“Our team was able to save this man’s life because we had EpiPens on site,” Neal said.
While HHI is shifting some of its resources to Hurricane Milton as it coordinates with more than 70 partners in Florida, Neal said the organization plans to continue dividing its resources and assets between North Carolina and Florida.
He said FedEx is a huge supporter of HHI’s relief efforts and that the organization has a charitable account with FedEx that allows it access to the shipping giant’s entire network to ship critical medical supplies overnight, if needed, from its warehouse in Lenexa.
“We just shipped out a resupply order today of asthma-related drugs, including inhalers and similar types of medications, for some patients in North Carolina,” Neal said.
While most of the medication that HHI dispenses is donated by large pharmaceutical companies, including free flu shots, tetanus vaccines and insulin, along with blood pressure and cholesterol medications for hurricane victims, Neal said the group had to use its own funds to buy more asthma medications.
Former truck drivers with active Class A CDLs as well as retired school bus drivers often volunteer to drive HHI’s mobile RV and some of organization’s other equipment.
“We have some volunteers who retired from other professions who decided it would be cool to get their CDLs, and we pay for them to do that in exchange for volunteering their services,” Neal said.
HHI also has a Mercedes Sprinter van, which Neal describes as a one-room doctor’s office that is equipped with an exam table and refrigerator to store medication like flu and Tdap vaccines. The smaller vehicle allows the medical teams to navigate traffic much more easily than the 45-foot RV in disaster areas.
HHI, which began in 1992, has delivered over $3 billion of medical supplies and aid to more than 130 countries.
The nonprofit medical organization also partners with Clinic in a Can (CIAC), which is headquartered in Bel Aire, Kansas. CIAC turns 20-foot intermodal containers into one-room medical clinics equipped with solar panels for power and diesel generators. Neal said HHI tested out one of CIAC’s first prototypes during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Michael Wawrzewski founded CIAC in 2002 after volunteering with an international organization that provided medical services in impoverished countries around the world. Besides serving as CIAC’s CEO, Wawrzewski has worked as a nurse practitioner for over 27 years, according to the organization’s website.
HHI can order more CIAC containers as needed, Neal said. They are placed on flatbed trailers and delivered to staging areas during natural disasters.
As of Thursday, Neal said HHI plans to stage its mobile clinic at Florida’s Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, then the organization’s teams will deploy to that location and set up health care operations.
As for Brown, she’s back on the road and won’t be home for a few weeks. Her rig was one of 50 custom Peterbilt trucks chosen in the U.S. and Canada to participate in Peterbilt’s annual Pride and Class Parade on Oct. 18 in Denton, Texas, to raise money for the United Way.
“Some people pulled their trucks off the road weeks ago to paint and polish their Peterbilts before the event,” Brown said. “I’ve got to get my stuff together. I am dealing with all of this mess and trying to drive, but I will pull it together before the event and get the truck looking pretty. This is something good to look forward to after this massive tragedy.”
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