Remote Area Medical, fresh from hurricane relief in Caribbean, prepares to go back

The remains of a plane lies on top of the remains of a house on the island of St. Maarten after Hurricane Irma.

Each time Stan Brock stepped off his plane on a Caribbean island late last week, he saw exactly what he expected:

Houses ripped apart. Boats thrown up from the ocean onto roads. Airplanes torn to smithereens. Trees stripped bare of leaves. Buildings leveled, save for heavy concrete structures.

In the three decades since he founded his East Tennessee-based nonprofit, Remote Area Medical, Brock has seen a lot of devastation wrought by hurricanes – and earthquakes, tornadoes and typhoons.

St. Maarten saw widespread damage from Hurricane Irma. The team said Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, and Dominica, a sovereign island nation, were even harder hit.

He’s also developed contacts on the ground in areas where resources are already strained before disasters, and where government help is slow to arrive – if it comes at all.

And he’s developed a sense for what are “highly essential supplies” in the days immediately following disaster, which is when RAM tries to respond.

So before landing at a former American airbase in the western part of Puerto Rico on Sept. 14, Brock and three RAM colleagues had loaded the small aircraft with lightweight, privately manufactured ready-to-eat meals (which taste “very good,” Brock said) and eight high-performance water purification systems, each weighing 27 pounds and able to purify 500 gallons of water in a 24-hour period.

RAM's plane is stuffed with supplies – including tarps, toiletries, ready-to-eat meals and water purifiers – on a post-Irma relief trip to the Caribbean.

“It can convert the dirtiest water into potable water,” Brock said, “and it operates off of 54 watts, about the same as a small lightbulb. A motorcycle battery would run the machine. A lot of these places don’t have power anymore, but there are a lot of car batteries lying around.”

The day after Puerto Rico, Brock piloted the plane to the Dutch island of St. Maarten, where only military and relief planes were being allowed to land. There they saw similar destruction and left meal packages and the water purification system, after training people to use it.

Their next stop, Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, was even more damaged, and though the British Royal Marines were present, the runway was too short for large aircraft.

The group found the six-story concrete Peebles Hospital unscathed, except for flooding in the basement – but the emergency room, which normally saw around 40 patients a day, was seeing 400, and the medical personnel were worn out from working days on end with no relief, Brock said.

Brock said RAM is already recruiting physicians, registered nurses and nurse practitioners to fly down for two-week shifts to relieve the locals.

A RAM volunteer demonstrates how to use a lightweight water purifier on St. Maarten after Hurricane Irma.

“I’ve found over the many, many years I’ve been doing this, when you take a medical team somewhere, they’re pretty beat up after two weeks and need to go to home and rest,” Brock said. “So we plan to rotate them.”

Right now, the need is for four emergency-room doctors, two general surgeons, two pediatricians, two orthopedists, some psychiatrists or psychologists, and numerous registered nurses. Volunteers can get information on RAM’s website.

“We’ll also send a community health-care team, since access to the hospital isn’t possible for all of them,” Brock said. “They don’t have transport because all their cars are wrecked.”

The RAM team also visited the Turks and Caicos Islands, which Brock said had less damage then but might be hit by upcoming storms. They didn’t make it over to the small island of Dominica, one of the first hit by Hurricane Irma when it was still a Category 5 storm, and pummeled further now by Hurricane Maria.

RAM Founder Stan Brock takes a tarp from RAM Medical Director Dr. Chris Sawyer while boarding a plane in Puerto Rico.

Brock said he lived on Dominica for several months many years ago and has seen photos of the devastation from friends there.

“It’s just been flattened,” he said. “The city is just completely destroyed.”

Dominica has been a sovereign island since 1978, so it’s unclear whether any larger countries will come to its aid, Brock said. He’s waiting to hear how RAM might help the small island, he said, and expects to travel there in the coming weeks.

He’s also waiting for reports of damage from Hurricane Maria in hard-hit Puerto Rico and on other islands he visited last week, and new needs there. Meanwhile, RAM is preparing for stateside free health clinics for the next two weekends, first in Lee County, Virginia, and then in East Ridge, just past Chattanooga.

“After that, I expect we’ll once again be launching to the Caribbean,” Brock said.

Hurricane Irma picked up a ship from the ocean and redeposited it on land at St. Maarten.

Brock said RAM is still collecting supplies: bottled water, hygiene items, baby formula and diapers, tools and cleaning supplies. They don’t need clothes, he said.

“I don’t know how many trucks we sent to Hurricane Harvey, and we’ve still got one on the road taking stuff to Ocala” in Florida, he said. “The public here in Knoxville has been very good about sending over supplies. We need them to keep doing so.”

Over 30 years, RAM has grown into a worldwide relief operation involving seven small passenger airplanes, a fleet of vehicles and more than 114,000 volunteers. It doesn’t take any government funds, Brock said, and is able to bypass bureaucracy to respond to emergencies more quickly than the governments in most cases – sometimes within hours.

But Brock has a bigger dream: a 727-class or larger airplane that could be based at McGhee Tyson Airport, loaded and ready to “take off and respond within 24 hours” when disaster strikes, he said. Brock would divide the interior to include room for volunteers, supplies, search-and-rescue dogs and a sterile operating theater for places where there exists nowhere to do surgery.

Then, he said, he would take it to Yemen, a small, war-torn Arabian country facing the world's worst cholera epidemic – 600,000 cases. In Yemen, Brock said, a child dies every 10 minutes.

Brock said he could pack a large aircraft with “desperately needed” supplies and fly to Uganda, across the Red Sea. He’d find a way to get some supplies across the water and “watch for the opportunity to fly across when the enemy is not looking,” Brock said. “Then get the heck out of there before they start shooting at us.”