My Participation In The International Disaster Response: Saint Maarten, September, 1995
To help you understand this story, know that the Netherlands Antilles is a semi-autonomous political entity of The Netherlands (Holland) consisting of the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao off the coast of Venezuela and the islands of Saba, Saint Eustatius and Saint Maarten in the northeast of the Caribbean (not far from Puerto Rico). Due to the location, rotation of the earth, and other factors, the islands in the south rarely experience hurricanes; the islands in the north?, well, read on.
I worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1989 to 1996 (WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations), based in Washington. I became a voluntary member of the disaster response team of the organization and was trained in the use of satellite telephone systems, first the size of a steamer trunk but down to the size of a suitcase by the mid-1990s. Today they are available in hand-held sizes at your local mobile phone store, and in multiple colors.
In early September of 1995, just after Microsoft released Windows 95 in late August, the OJ Simpson trial was bubbling-up to a boil, and on the day that Cal Ripken broke the un-breakable record of Lou Gehrig (a Columbia student like me) for consecutive baseball games played, Category 4 Hurricane Luis ravaged the Eastern Caribbean, including the island of Saint Maarten, a small island that is politically divided between the Netherlands and France.
[Facts On Cal Ripken: On Wednesday, September 6, 1995, Cal Ripken played in his 2,131st consecutive baseball game, beating the record of Lou “Iron Horse” Gerig. I stayed up late to watch the game on TV including all the ceremonies; probably should have gotten my rest].
[Facts On Hurricane Luis: Luis was a long-lived and powerful Category 4 hurricane; it was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Americas that year, and the third-most intense hurricane recorded during the 1995 hurricane season (the others did not make landfall).
Highest wind speed: 149 mph
Total fatalities: 19
Date: August 28, 1995 – September 12, 1995
Damage: $3.3 billion (1995 USD)
Category: Category 4 Hurricane (SSHWS)
Lowest Pressure: 935 mbar (hPa); 27.61 inHg
Affected Areas: Saint Martin, (September 6, 1995) Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, other islands, and Nova Scotia, Canada (as a subtropical storm).]
Despite having stayed up late on Wednesday evening to watch the Ripken event, I got up early and made my way to work in downtown Washington, DC, on Thursday morning. I was anticipating getting the “call to the bullpen” to provide some “relief pitching” for somewhere down in the Caribbean; but where would they send me?.
Not long after I got to my desk, I in fact got the call from the director of disaster response in the Washington office: “Tom, we want you to take that satellite phone, go to Saint Maarten, and meet up with the International Red Cross down there; they are already setup in a compound near the airport. The island is a wreck: no electricity, no water…oh, and we want you to leave now.”
I was a happily stunned to be finally tapped to take my satellite telephone training into the field…but I had to go now? and to a place with no water??
First, I had to get the permission of my direct report (a non-nonsense man of German ancestry) who was not too thrilled about me going on this “vacation” (as he labeled it) to the Caribbean in that I was supposed to be learning this new product called “Windows 95”. It was now my job now to figure out how “Windows 95” could be deployed organization-wide.
“I know this is important to you. You can go, but do not stay too long, and stay safe,” he said.
I managed to negotiate an evening departure from Washington so that I could slip home, grab a backpack, pack some clothes, and say good-bye to my wife Lucy and young son Nolan.
I made it as far as San Juan, Puerto Rico on Thursday night. I was traveling light: backpack on my back, the suitcase-size satellite phone in my right-hand, and a book about “Windows 95” to serve as my time-passer in my left-hand. As I always travel, I was in a suit-and-tie (you get better service).
I had a letter signed by the director of the disaster response department at WHO Washington stating who I was and where I was going, but since this time-period coincided with the biannual renewal of my United Nations Passport (which was therefore in New York for renewal), I only travelled with my United States Passport to legally identify me. This turned out to be a problem.
From Washington,DC via Orlando, I arrived in Puerto Rico late Thursday night.
San Juan had suffered a glancing blow from Luis: the bays, creeks, and other waterways were all full of water and the trees were all bent in the same direction. I was running on fumes by this time, but, being wired and not able to sleep, I went down to the casino of the hotel to play a few hands of Blackjack; almost nobody there but me. I learned from the dealer (before he fleeced me) that all the “foreigners” had evacuated San Juan not knowing if Luis would smack Puerto Rico or not.
Next morning (Friday), I got up early to catch my flight to Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands that would place me just 90 miles from my final objective: Saint Maarten. In the San Juan airport, I bought two, two-liter bottles of water and a box of granola bars figuring I could live on this stash for several days if I had to. Remember: no potable water in Saint Maarten.
The short flight to Saint Thomas, US Virgin Islands, was uneventful, but when I got there I was informed that all commercial and private airflights to Saint Maarten had been suspended by the Saint Maarten authorities and that any planes that tried to land there would be shot down. Great.
“You could have told me this back in San Juan,” I thought to myself.
This being the era before mobile phones, I found a pay phone and called my “handler” back in Washington and explained the situation to her: I was “marooned” 90 miles from my objective. She said to call back in an hour or so and they would come up with Plan B.
Meanwhile, I struck up a conversation with two Canadian businessmen who owned a hotel on the French side of Saint Maarten. When they found out that I worked for the World Health Organization they thought they could use me as their “diplomatic ticket” to get around the flight restriction into the Saint Maarten airport (which is on the Dutch side of the island) and they would therefore rent a Lear Jet to get onto the island with me as their “sponsor”. The problem was, I did not have my UN Passport with me (as stated above) so Plan C was a no-go. They abandoned me and rented a helicopter to get them directly to their property on the French side. No word as to whether they ever made it or if they were shot down.
After a few hourly phone calls later back to my “handler” back in Washington, Plan B came to light: “Get yourself to Curaçao and meet up with the Dutch Military; they have a compound at the airport where they are staging relief flights into Saint Maarten. They are already expecting you.”
This being the time before online flight websites, I had a printed flight guide with me; problem was, there were no direct flights from San Juan (north side of the Caribbean) to Curaçao (south side). I would have to back-track to Miami and catch a flight from there to Curaçao on Saturday morning.
By this time, I was tired, frustrated, and I almost decided to just abandon the mission and go back to Washington, but I was also determined to take this satellite telephone that was “latched” to my right-hand to its designated destination in Saint Maarten. I had been told by my “handler” that there was no phone service on the island, the only means of communication was by shortwave radio, and they really needed me to get to Saint Maarten as soon as possible.
American Airlines selected me for an upgrade to First Class (it’s the suit-and-tie) and I got back to Miami in the early evening of Friday. While walking through the terminal, I noticed that a flight was loading for Saint Maarten!. When I got to the check-in kiosk and explained to the clerk who I was, what I had in my right-hand (the satellite phone), and I showed her the letter from WHO. The airline worker (not from American Airlines) stated that only residents of Saint Maarten were being allowed onto the flight, no exceptions. Once again, without that UN Passport, I was not getting on that flight, so, Plan D was a bust; back to Plan B, or was it Plan C?. I had lost track by then.
I had been to the Miami airport countless times in my travels to/from Latin America and the joke at WHO was that “…even when you die, you have to change at Miami,” but I had never stayed the night there. I tried to get some sleep at the airport hotel but by now I was so wired that sleep was difficult.
Next morning (Saturday), on the flight to Curaçao with a bunch of tourists, I was happily on American Airlines and in First Class again; all uneventful. The flight crew knew what I was up to, so upon landing, they let me be first off the plane and I literally ran across the tarmac, satellite phone in right-hand. A policeman spotted me running along and when he caught up with me, I asked him for help: “…get me to the Dutch Military compound”. He babbled in Papiamento (the language of Curaçao) into his radio and soon a golf cart was produced that drove me over to the compound on the other side of the airport (where the military aircraft were staged; had been running in the wrong direction).
When I got there, I was greeted with:
“Oh, so YOU are Mr. Costigan!…we were expecting you yesterday!!”
Well, yeah.
“No worries, Mr. Costigan, we have a relief flight loading now and we should be on our way in about an hour; please relax in the departure lounge.”
“One question for you, Mr. Costigan: we hear by shortwave radio reports that the people on Saint Maarten are saying that there are rumors of all kinds diseases breaking out all over the island; what is the WHO position on this issue and what it is going to do about it?”
What HAD I gotten myself into NOW? I was just a computer programmer trained to use this satellite telephone device, not a doctor or a medical researcher.
Instead of relaxing, I found a pay phone (remember them?) and called the assistant director of Washington WHO at his home in Virginia. He was glad to know that I was safe, but he also thought I would have certainly been in Saint Maarten by now (well, yeah) since I had left on Thursday and now it is Saturday. I relayed the issue about the diseases, and he said that he would pass it on to the WHO office in Caracas, Venezuela (the national office handles the Netherlands Antilles) and that I should not worry too much it in that rumors like this always flew when there was a disaster.
The flight from Curaçao to Saint Maarten was on a Fokker 50 propeller plane that normally seats about 50 people. There were but a half-dozen of us passengers on the flight and therefore the majority of the seats were filled with large plastic sports-team water containers (buckled in); the aisles were filled with stretchers and large packages of toilet paper, paper towels, and other supplies (some tied down, most not). Definitely NOT First Class on American, but a hot meal was produced (the thought crossed my mind that it might be my last).
After a few-hours’ flight back east across the Caribbean (going back to just 90 miles from where I had been on Friday morning), as we landed into Saint Maarten, I strained my neck to see the landscape. I saw mostly devastation: trees were down, boats up on dry land where they had floated when the storm-surge came in (on their sides displaying their keels), the roofs of most buildings were torn off and the shingles were all over the place. Oddly, in the late afternoon sun, I saw tourists still tanning themselves on the beach as the plane came in for a landing. With no electricity and no water, they had nothing else better to do.
The airport was chaotic: no lights, tourists from the Americas, Asia, and Europe hoping if not fighting to find a flight out. Also, no customs inspectors: I just waltzed out of the terminal and found a taxi. I explained to the driver that I needed to get to the Red Cross compound, and he said: “No problem, guy; everybody know where ‘day be.”
Two minutes later, I was deposited at the Red Cross compound on the road parallel to the single runway of the international airport, just as the sun was setting in the west and the full moon was rising over the mountains to the east (what a beautiful sight!). It had been 48 hours since I left Washington, and I had finally made it to my objective.
When I explained to the fellow who was loosely guarding the entrance to the compound who I was and what I had in my right-hand, he said:
“Well, come on in!”
He sent someone to get the director and when he arrived, he said:
“Well, Mr. Costigan!; we were expecting you on yesterday!”
Well, yeah.
He gave me a brief orientation of what was going on there: the compound was occupied by about 20 or so nurses, 12 or so doctors, and 12 or so administrators/staff who had come over by boat from Curaçao on Wednesday, arriving just after the storm went through. I told him I needed a spot where the unit could “see” the satellites in the southern sky and the director suggested I setup on the porch of the building on the south side; perfect.
I then went about the process of setting up the satellite phone and ran into a few more problems that once again made me question why I had ever gotten into this predicament in the first place.
There was no electricity and all the extension cords in the compound were allocated from generators to a critical medical device. No problem, I thought, I will just get things going using the battery power of the unit.
I opened the case/lid of the unit and tried to turn it on; the battery was dead. Oops.
Soon an extension cord was produced, but I had another problem: at the last training session on the unit, we had placed a piece of white tape with the incoming phone number of the unit inside the lid; you need to tell the number (along with the satellite code) to callers so they can call you back.
The piece of white tape was gone. Double Oops.
But then I remembered an important point from the training: you call the satellite operator, and he/she can tell you what the phone number is. Breath in, breath out.
With generated electric power now provided, I turned the unit on, adjusted the angle and direction of the case (which serves as the antennae of the unit), and it acquired one of the several possible satellites, bingo!. I made the call to the operator, and she provided the incoming number.
Breath in, breath out, again.
The satellite phone was up and running. The darkness of the Caribbean Island was now complete, but I was ready to help provide some “light” to the island via the satphone.
One of the Dutch fellows who had observed me squirming through all of this went to get the director. When the director arrived, I asked him to whom did he want me to place the first call.
I explained to him that a satellite call is half-duplex, that is, only one person at a time can speak. I explained that there will be a delay in what he says getting to the recipient, and that his voice would be highly distorted by the connection, to the point that the person on the other end may not recognize his voice.
His first request was to a number in Amsterdam, albeit it was the middle of the night in Holland by this time. I placed the call and when someone actually answered, I passed the receiver to the director who was so excited to speak directly to someone in Holland that he forgot everything I had just told him about the half-duplex call issues; it took him a bit, but then he got the hang of back-and-forth talking on a half-duplex satellite phone. Over…over and out.
After that, he had me call Curaçao; same struggle at first to cadence the communication, but then things settled in.
When the second call was over, he said:
“Mr. Costigan, I have accomplished more in the last 15 minutes than I was able to do since we arrived here on Wednesday; short-wave radio simply does not do it. Thank you very much for coming here.”
For the first time since I left Washington on Thursday, I would take a real good, deep breath in and out, and feel really good about myself.
I spent a few more hours helping folks make calls. There was no room at the compound for me to sleep, so I agreed to join a few folks who were staying at a hotel and few miles away (no generators so no electricity there, no air conditioning or television or refrigerated food, just an open balcony door to allow in the delightful Caribbean breeze, plus a few bugs).
I was instructed to take the satphone with me wherever I went, so it was with me in my dark room.
Listening to the waves and the bugs, I drifted off to sleep, a smile on my face.
Next day (Sunday), I set up shop again on the porch of the compound and played high-tech telephone operator for the International Red Cross (IRC). During breaks, I was able to take a walk out back of the compound, along the lagoon of the island: the devastation left by the storm was again evident to me by the multitude of tress leaning or blown down, boats flung up onto the land and left stranded on their sides when the waters receded, and debris all over the place (mostly shingles from buildings and homes that were evidently sent flying like missiles during the storm). I spent most of my time sitting at the phone, reading the “Windows 95” book I had brought down with me in my left-hand, and making and taking calls as required.
People from the community were coming and going into the compound. Since I could not understand their language, I was told they were asking questions about the rumors they heard about all these diseases breaking out, and others were seeking medical attention. At one point, two fellows came up the walkway, helping another man to make his way, evidently to seek medical care. Then, the impaired man just slumped down the ground, passed out, right in front of me on my perch on the porch. He appeared lifeless to me.
My Boy Scout training then kicked in: while his friends and several others attended to him, I ran into the building to summon help. Two doctors followed me back out front. To my surprise, they started arguing with each other as to what to do to save this person’s life.
My face froze in fear, and I thought to myself:
“Please, PLEASE, stop arguing and just save this guy’s life! I don’t what to see him die in front of me!!.”
One doctor took over and administered CPR to the victim; all I could do was pray; after maybe three cycles of mouth breath and chest compressions that seemed like an eternity, the fellow came around. He woke up, all startled in a frenzy, and his friends helped him into a waiting chair. I had never seen someone be given CPR to be revived to life, and frankly I never want to see it again.
Another deep breath in and out.
After a few minutes of recovery, he and his friends walked off just like nothing happened.
Later on Sunday afternoon, a newspaper reporter from the Associated Press came into the compound; when he found out what I had, he asked if he could use the phone to call in his story. All these phone calls are costly and WHO was picking up the tab, but I agreed and helped him place the call back to his bureau in order to help get the story out about the conditions here.
As the sun was beginning to set, the electricity came back on into the compound. Blackjack.
That evening, I was called in from my perch on the porch to join their nightly staff meeting, where pony bottles of warm Heineken beer were being passed around. The director publicly thanked me for coming down from Washington and stated that mine was the first and only satellite telephone to arrive on the island. The advantage it would give to his team in managing this disaster was immense.
Warm beer and melted ice cream never tasted so good.
When the meeting was breaking up, I comically said “Bõa Noite!” which is how you say “Good Night” in Portuguese; I honestly did not know that is also how you say “Good Night” in Papiamento (which is a hodge-podge language of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and other languages).
“Mr. Costigan has barely been here one day with us, and he already speaks our language,” someone said.
“Please call me Tom,” said I.
I spent Monday working the phone and training Red Cross staff in how to use it. In a call back to my boss, he asked:
“How is your Caribbean vacation? I need you back here working on this ‘Windows 95’ thing.”
This was not no damned vacation….and besides, I was in fact reading the “Windows 95” book to get up to speed on the new technology, exactly what I would have been doing back in Washington.
I also spoke with the assistant director of WHO Washington who had relayed to me that my information from Saturday was well-received by the WHO offices in Venezuela and Trinidad; the Trinidad office agree to send their epidemiologist to Saint Maarten to analyze and help manage any issues related any disease outbreaks. I knew the fellow quite well, having worked in the Trinidad office several times, I had visited his home and lovely family in the hills over Port of Spain for drinks and dinner, and I knew he would do a good job in Saint Maarten. I was glad that my information from Saturday had triggered a positive response by my organization on Monday.
The assistant director also gave his approval for me to leave the satellite phone behind and the IRC would somehow get it back to Washington later on.
Given that the compound was just across from the runway of the airport, every time a plane took off or landed, everyone who did not have ear plugs had to “hard stick” their pinky fingers into their ears to block the noise. This procedure got real old real fast, but the in-flow of jumbo jets meant that relief supplies were coming onto the island, so, it was the sound of progress. From this experience, I learned that Russian-made jets are MUCH LOUDER noise makers than US or European jets.
On Monday evening, I came up with the idea to let the compound staff make a short call back to their families back in Curaçao or other islands of the Netherlands Antilles. I coached each one about the half-duplex phone issue and each one got excited and forgetful of my coaching when the call went through, but then each settled into a brief conversation that was highly appreciated.
It was now Tuesday. I had negotiated a Wednesday departure with my boss, so Tuesday would be my last full day on the island; I now took the role of “trainer/supervisor” of the Red Cross staff who was assigned at that time to monitor the phone.
Somehow, the number of the satellite phone had gotten out to the world; calls were coming in from Europe and the Americas from people looking for their relatives. I took one call from a fellow in the Midwest who was looking for his daughter and her boyfriend and he said that he wanted to come down there and look for them. I assured him that things were mostly under control, electricity was back on, and that within a few days that phone service would be no doubt back up. Given that I was an American in Saint Maarten and spoke “his language”, I convinced him to not come.
That afternoon, the director offered to give me a quick driving tour around the local neighborhood to see the aftermath. A week after the storm, there was still debris everywhere. You had the odd cases of Build A and Building C being heavily damaged but Building B right in between having almost no damage. I recall seeing at a children’s playground a playset crushed by fallen trees.
The one thing I had noticed was that there were no birds.
“Where are the birds? Every other Caribbean Island I have ever been to has had lots of birds.”
“They all got blown off the island by the hurricane,” he replied, “but they will be back soon enough.”
The next day (Wednesday), I provided final instructions to the IRC staff on how to use and maintain the satellite phone. I said “good-bye” to the staff, who all gave me a round of applause, and the director himself drove me to the airport. Since I never had to open the two bottles of water and the box of granola bars I bought on Friday, I left them behind. Water was still in short supply.
I was worried that not having an entry stamp in my Passport would cause a problem on the way out, but “…no problem, man” said the Customs Officer as I went through the line.
I was able to get a flight back to New York’s JFK airport. As I took off, I calculated that I had spent eighty-four hours without birds, the most challenging and rewarding time of my professional career.
On the fight back to the USA (American Airlines First Class, of course), as the land in the distance came into view, I knew it was my native Long Island. I noted that this was the first time in the many trips I had flow to Latin American or the Caribbean that I would be coming back to my native New York City. This added to the sense of accomplishment that I was feeling.
I was afraid, however, that everyone on the flight would be quarantined upon landing due to all the rumors about disease in Saint Maarten; thankfully, this did not happen. I called my parents who lived a few miles away from JFK and they were glad to know I was back in the USA safely and not diseased.
When I finally made it back to Virginia that evening, after kissing my wife and young son, I went through the several Washington Post newspapers that had gone unread during my absence; there in the Monday edition was the story about Saint Maarten by the AP reporter, basically word-for-word from what I had heard him dictate into the satellite phone on Sunday afternoon.
Back at work on Thursday, it was back to the grind, albeit I had to write a report, similar to this write-up, for the director of the WHO Washington office. I received a hand-written note of appreciation from him several days later.
My boss admonished me to please make up for the lost time on this “Windows 95” thing; turns out, I had already read more than half of the 500 page book.
A few months later, the IRC director from Netherland Antilles came to Washington and brought the satellite phone with him. He invited me and my boss out to lunch and said to my boss:
“We really appreciated Tom’s efforts on this matter. His was the first satellite phone onto the island and it gave us a firm strategic advantage I the management of the disaster. The local government in Saint Maarten wanted to use this event as an excuse to round up immigrants who were not there legally, working in the construction and hotel industry and such, and to expel them. The locals wanted to declare that the entire place was about to blow up into a disease contagion. With the phone Tom brought, we were able to get word out to the government folks in Amsterdam and Curaçao about this, and they put the stop to it. The immigrants are still there, earning a living, helping to rebuild Saint Maarten”
So, there was and never would be a massive outbreak of disease on Saint Maarten after Hurricane Luis; now I knew where the rumors came from.
“What about the birds?” I asked.
“Oh, they all came back, just as I said they would…and they thanked you, too, for asking about them.”
Deep breath in, deep breath out.
In summary, in less-than one week, I had to use all of my mental, physical, and deterministic skills to help affect a positive outcome for the citizens (and immigrants) of Saint Maarten by delivering a satellite phone to the professionals of the International Red Cross; despite a few issues and mistakes, I believe I made a positive impact on the situation and helped the people of Saint Maarten get back on their feet faster and better than otherwise.