Where in the World is West Hancock, Mississippi?

The Two-Year Story of a Fire Department in Need

By: TIGER SCHMITTENDORF

June 8, 2007

For years I’ve “threatened” the members of my fire company with putting them on a bus to travel across Erie County; New York State; or the entire U.S. of A. for them to see just how good they have it – or how good they could have it.

Recently, I had the opportunity to take such a tour myself.

As a recipient of a Department of Homeland Security grant, I traveled to New Orleans for the required thermal imager training. I had never been to New Orleans and really had no idea what to expect, especially post hurricane.

Rather coincidently, I received an e-mail a few months ago detailing the plight of a fire department still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina: the West Hancock Fire-Rescue Department.

That e-mail came from Suzanne Stahl, a real estate financer – come disaster relief coordinator, from Phoenix, AZ. Suzanne had been helping the firefighters who lived at the strongest edge of the storm where Katrina made landfall.

The original e-mail she sent me was complex and had many twists, some even seemingly unbelievable. I readily admit that I too was skeptical at first, so I used some national contacts to verify her credibility and that of her story. Both checked out.

Now, by chance of this training, it put us both in the same place at the same time and offered me the opportunity to witness the destruction and the fire department’s dilemma firsthand.

We spent six hours traveling from New Orleans to Biloxi and West Hancock, Mississippi and back again, with her telling their story, me taking photos and both of us talking to the people affected by the “100-year storm.”

So, as I’ve learned from her communications and most recently, first person, this is a story that has not been told and certainly one that needs to be. I can only hope to do it justice.

Following are the first few paragraphs from Suzanne’s original e-mail to me:

“I’ve come to realize that most people don’t know where Hurricane Katrina made landfall – the eye of the storm landed at the mouth of the Pearl River, in western Hancock County, Mississippi on August 29, 2005 at 10:00 a.m.

The eye of Hurricane Katrina made direct contact with the Town of Pearlington. The hurricane’s 140 mile-per-hour sustained winds took hours to pass through Hancock County. The fierce winds whipped the violent storm surge miles inland (which was recorded at 34 feet at its highest point). It submerged almost the entire southern half of the county for some nine hours before the water started to recede.

Every home and building in Pearlington was destroyed. West Hancock Fire- Rescue conducted the initial search and rescue operations by themselves. The town and its residents waited 10 days for outside assistance to arrive.

The men and women of West Hancock Fire-Rescue have seen and dealt with more catastrophic devastation than most people will ever see in their lives.

Personally, they have lost family, personal possessions and vehicles. Every serving firefighter lost their own home.

In the past year and a half they have had to recover the remains of dozens of people that they have known for years – friends, neighbors, relatives, some horribly mutilated and from unbelievable wreckage.

The story of these men and woman becomes even more extraordinary when one sees firsthand the totality of all that they’ve lost and the conditions they’ve continued to exist in, yet they persevere in answering the call to duty in order to keep their department alive and functional. Their firefighter brethren should be proud to call them one of their own.

West Hancock Fire-Rescue has first due responsibility to a 75 square mile area in the southwest corner of Hancock County, Mississippi – “Ground Zero” for Hurricane Katrina’s final and most catastrophic landfall.

Their area of responsibility includes 18 miles of US Interstate 10 (13 miles in Mississippi and the first 5 miles of Louisiana), 15 miles of US Highway 90 (that runs along the ocean coastline), 10 miles of State Highway 607 and an industrial port - Port Bienville, in Mississippi. Emergency calls have become more complex by virtue of the conditions that now exist.

West Hancock Fire-Rescue is an all volunteer fire department. The doors that they used to knock on for donations are all now gone, literally, although many of the residents remain as they try to rebuild. The neighboring cities in Hancock County were heavily damaged, so they cannot help remedy this situation,” she wrote.

Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? I thought so too, until I saw it for myself.

What’s more unbelievable is that the way they’re living hasn’t changed much since the storm, almost two years now.

Prior to Katrina, this small rural fire department responded to more than 800 runs a year. Since Katrina, that number has tripled to more than 2,400 incidents. And, that’s only the documented ones.

They’re running to 600+ calls a year on the Interstate highway alone – most of them wrecks with many of those being very serious ones.

As the community attempts to rebuild, West Hancock’s call volume goes up. Construction injuries are on the rise as serious falls, cuts, breaks and entrapments test the fire department’s limited resources. And, with debris removal and new construction underway, also come frequent and expensive flat tires on fire department vehicles – a couple each month.

To say money is their biggest challenge is an understatement. The fire department is rendered ineligible for grant monies because they do not have the matching funds required to receive them.

Hancock County forgave all property taxes for three years to allow the community a chance to re-build. Thus, it will be a few years before the fire department’s tax base is rebuilt and they’re eligible for distribution of any local county funds. They received a total of $6,000 from Hancock County last year, the result of a payout from one of the few casinos that have been able to re-build.

With their growing call volume comes sky-rocketing fuel costs – to the tune of $2,000+ a month. FEMA doesn’t pay for operating expenses.

There is some good news. They have been loaned fire trucks and equipment from fire departments across the country.

However, they don’t have a fire station to put them in. The fire trucks are parked under a three-sided lean-to structure and the firefighters operate out of a double-wide mobile home trailer.

The trailer serves as their office, equipment storage and home to several of the department members. Those who don’t live at the “fire station,” live in tow-behind travel trailers provided by FEMA.

Prior to Katrina the fire department had more than 35 members. Now there are 10 in all. The others moved north when Katrina hit, to higher ground and a chance to save their families and re-start their lives.

Let me introduce you to their firefighters.

Fifty-two year old Kim Jones is the fire chief, a big man with an even bigger heart. By their terms, Kim’s considered a “Yankee” as he moved to Mississippi from Kentucky. He’s a gracious man, overwhelmed by the support they’ve received to date. He downplays their situation and has goals of helping others in similar situations.

Kim’s wife Vicky takes EMS calls and serves as the department’s secretary and treasurer. She’s been waiting for a kidney transplant since 2003 and had to turn down a donor last month because they don’t have a home with any semblance of a sterile environment in which she can recover from the surgery.

Val responds to structure and grass fires but doesn’t care for car wrecks much. He’s 68 years old. Tommy Dean is in his 50’s and shares Val’s sentiments towards auto accidents. Twenty-year old Donald Ray is very active, taking many rescue calls along with Kim’s son, 21-year old Korri-Don Jones, a career firefighter in another town.

Then there’s “Tug.” I didn’t have the chance to meet him but I got the idea that his name matches his size. Tug’s wife is starting a certified first responder course soon. She just had a baby boy who’s already been nicknamed “Little Tug.”

New recruit Daryl Webb is in his forties and is very active despite being in the department for just four or five months. The newest rookie is Andrew, a 20-year old thirsting for firefighter training that’s apparently hard to come by in those parts of Mississippi.

But, at more than a thousand calls a year, these people should be worn out. I asked them how they could possibly respond to so many calls with so few people and their answer was: “One firefighter at a time.”

Imagine responding to a serious wreck on one of your highways with just one or two people. Imagine trying to save lives with fewer rescuers than there are victims.

But these folks aren’t complaining. These are simply good people with tremendous heart and a willingness to help others. The same words you would use to describe any other first responder. The difference is they’ve endured more than most of us could ever imagine.

Hopefully by now you’re asking yourself, “What can we do to help?”

I’m glad you asked.

When I received Suzanne’s e-mail, I passed it on to a few thousand firefighters in our county via our broadcast distribution list. Fortunately some of them listened. You can do the same.

Volunteer firefighters from the Collins area in Southern Erie County (Buffalo NY) responded in a big way. They’ve made three trips to West Hancock already, bringing friends from the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation and Collins Center Fire Companies and the Gowanda Ambulance Service with them.

The first time they took a truck and trailer full of donated equipment and supplies along with nine volunteers.

Chief Jones deputized them immediately and put them to work as the men and women from Collins ran calls with West Hancock, giving them some well deserved relief.

They traveled on their own time and ticket. That’s right. The individuals, not their fire departments, paid their own travel expenses and took time off of work and away from their families to help their fellow firefighters – for a week at a time.

While there, they responded to several serious accidents, including one that killed a father and left his young son in critical condition in a New Orleans trauma center.

There efforts were detailed in a recent news article in the local Sea Coast Echo newspaper, “Firefighters from the Bayside Fire Department, West Hancock Fire Department, and Collins N.Y. Fire Department extracted the five-year-old from the vehicle.”

Collins has gone so far as to set up a not-for-profit relief team called Hancock Hope to organize support for West Hancock Fire-Rescue. My helmet is off to Dan Macakanja and his team for taking on the coordination of the much needed, but informal, physical manpower response.

While some might try to construe Collins’ actions as freelancing or self-deployment, there is a clear request for and acceptance of their assistance on behalf of both parties, despite it being outside of the normal channels that we’re accustomed to.

West Hancock’s is an extraordinary situation in that it’s estimated they will need sustained outside support for the next 24 months in order to continue serving their community. Personally, I have never been involved in a two-year mutual aid fire department deployment and I’d like to meet someone who has. These appear to be un-chartered waters.

In this case, Collins and those they’re rallying are simply doing the right thing – that needs to be done.

With that said, one of my first questions to them was, “There are an awful lot of fire departments between Collins, New York and West Hancock, Mississippi that could or should be helping. Why aren’t they?”

The simple answer is “because they’re not aware of the need.” Maybe you and your fire department will be the next to get involved.

I saw firsthand that many things look as they did the day after Katrina struck, and it’s now almost two years later. I think everyone has the perception that the government swoops in and makes everything right when a disaster of this magnitude strikes. The folks down there know the harsh reality of this misconception, and the fire department is no more immune to it than the common citizen.

Every department member has lost their own home and struggles to juggle their paying jobs, attempting to rebuild while responding to the needs of a community that has already lost so much.

Some thirteen years ago, I was part of a group of firefighters from across my county, and across our country, who mounted a relief effort for firefighters in war-torn Bosnia. We sent them cargo boxes of equipment and supplies to support them as they fought fires in their homeland, all the while wearing rain slickers and sneakers, and while they were being shot at.

My question to you is, “If we can do that for firefighters half a world away, why can’t we do it for our brother firefighters in Mississippi?”

They are determined to move themselves and their community past this situation. The reality is that they are in great need of physical and financial support in order to stabilize and rebuild - in what has now become an extraordinary situation, on top of an extraordinary situation.

This is a call-to-action to all first responders everywhere to help out West Hancock Fire-Rescue and others in need. Your financial support or presence would be of great physical and emotional help to this department.

I think Suzanne Stahl summed it up best in her e-mail: “Since I first arrived in Mississippi – just two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall - I have seen more than I ever could have ever imagined, and more than I could ever describe.

Although much of this region of our country has become a surreal world, the situation at West Hancock Fire-Rescue is one of the most unsettling and compelling things that I’ve encountered since those first days; due to its severity, its duration, its all-encompassing nature, due to the number of lives that have been and could be irrevocably affected by this situation – and because I know that few people are aware that they even exist, or what they are going through as I write this.

All of this is just as strongly offset by the steadfastness, the character and the bravery of the members of the West Hancock Fire Rescue, who now need our support.”

I’ve seen the devastation with my own eyes and mere words or even photographs cannot describe what I experienced. You need to see it for yourself.

For more information on how you and/or your emergency services agency can help:

To volunteer assistance:

Dan Macakanja

Hancock Hope

danmac@iwon.com

Cell: 716-341-2870

To donate supplies or funds, or for additional information:

Suzanne Stahl

Hands-On Gulf Coast

suzanneinmississippi@earthlink.net

www.handsongulfcoast.org

Cell: 602-791-7799

To learn more about the fire department:

West Hancock Fire-Rescue: www.westhancockfirerescue.org

He is a nationally certified fire instructor and a firefighter with the Evans Center Volunteer Fire Company in the Town of Evans NY since 1980, currently serving as Chief of Training, Webmaster and Public Information Officer (PIO).

He previously served as Managing Editor of The Fire Fighter Newspaper and created a recruitment effort that doubled his own fire department's membership and helped net 500-plus new volunteers countywide.

Schmittendorf can be reached by e-mail at schmitte@erie.gov.