In that moment, when you realize you need help, that’s when we’re supposed to fulfill our main purpose: to be there with that help. And we were ready to help … in Miami and Key West, even with two feet of water on the roads. We were fine there. But up north, we knew we were in trouble. That moment of silence after the storm was a bad moment for a lot of people, but I think it was the worst for me and my volunteers. We realized we were out of position and that hell might break loose before we got there. Some locations weren’t nearly as bad as we were worried about. People were civil and were helping each other. The weak got help first. It was the best of America. Then you’d go to the next location and it would be out-and-out looting and every man for himself.
No, I don’t want to talk about those three nursing homes that made the news. Not at all.
FantasticLand was an interesting case from a number of perspectives. We knew, from dealings with the company going all the way back to the 1980s, that they kept ample water, rations, medicine, and other survival gear at multiple locations around the park as well as an internal communications system to communicate with their employees. The idea, as it was relayed to me, was that they could survive for a couple of days of being cut off from all civilization with a park full of people. I was able to speak with some of their board members a couple weeks after Sadie hit, and I was assured that they were staffed with something like three hundred employees and that those employees would be able to stay alive for another month if they needed to. I know this point is in dispute, but I have the conversation on the record, so I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know or haven’t heard for yourself. I was also assured that all the visitors had been transported inland and that we were dealing primarily with employees. At one point, the board member raised the issue of his visitors’ luggage, which was way, way down the list of relevant topics. I don’t want to make this sound like he didn’t care about his employees. He clearly did from an administrative and personal standpoint, but in disasters, people react differently. It’s not uncommon for people to focus on one thing they can control amid a sea of chaos and hyperfocus on that one thing. If you ask my opinion as someone who’s worked in disaster preparedness and response for three decades, I think he was scared and didn’t want to think that his employees would be in any danger. Of course they were in danger. We all were.
What this conversation with representatives from FantasticLand did right away was bump FantasticLand way down the list in terms of which locations we were going to tackle and in what order. When you have five thousand locations in need of assistance, it only made sense that FantasticLand cede its place in line to more immediate concerns, and trust me, we had more immediate concerns. We had a million people homeless. We had over ten million people without power. We had rescue efforts and aid distribution and truckloads of unwanted aid to deal with. Volunteers flooded in faster than we could assign them duties. FantasticLand had water and food and relative safety for three hundred employees. We knew they were there, and we were going to get them. It was just going to take some time.
The other aspect of FantasticLand that made it an interesting case was the way the park was set up. It’s one huge, several-thousand-acre park divided into different sections, but topographically, it’s on a decent piece of land as far as flooding is concerned. It wasn’t going to flood easily, is what I mean. Also, Mr. Tracks, I believe his name was, had built detention cells around a few areas, the thinking being that they would either prevent flooding altogether or lessen the effect, which they certainly did. That was another reason we put FantasticLand behind other locations where people were drowning and fighting over resources.
What we didn’t account for, and what no one could have accounted for, was that the rain kept coming. After Sadie finally blew herself out, we could not catch a break for weeks. September is the wet season in that part of the state anyway—well, one of the wet seasons—but that year it was beyond what we expected. Some locations around Daytona received up to twenty-four inches of rain in the three weeks after Sadie, which had a very negative effect on rescue efforts.
We don’t deny that a lot of people died, but when you only have so many boots on the ground and only so much air support and more places to evacuate than you ever have in the history of your organization, and you get two feet of rain on top of that, everything is not going to go as planned. What you must understand about the world of disaster response is you do the most good you can with the full understanding that you can’t get to everyone quickly and that, because this is a disaster, people are going to die. Now that I’m no longer in a leadership role with the Red Cross, I can also point out that consolidations led to less volunteer training and fewer hands to work with in my particular case, but to be fair, we wouldn’t have had enough hands if we had suddenly found ourselves at double our funding levels. It was a massive, massive undertaking, and we started from behind. Then, like any disaster, managing the people who want to help becomes a big job. We had busloads of Boy Scouts and mission groups show up every day and we had to tell them, “It’s not safe here. Turn around.” We were going through neighborhood by neighborhood, and some of them were a completely inappropriate environment for volunteers. I remember one day a semitruck full of stuffed animals showed up. Everyone had a million things to do and all of a sudden we had tens of thousands of stuffed animals to deal with. The families who could maybe use them had no place to put them. Everyone wants to help, but oh man, when that truckload of stuffed animals showed up I was about ready to kill someone. We ended up dumping them in a detention cell and commandeering the truck to ship supplies. I remember shots of the thousands of stuffed animals floating in filthy water showing up on the news.
I’m sorry; I keep veering from the subject. We first approached FantasticLand on September 29 from the air. We had surveillance planes in the sky hours after the storm broke, and again, FantasticLand was an interesting case. We could see the front had flooded, and we could see the swamp-like conditions all the way around the park, but we could also see most of the park was dry and there were no obvious signs of distress from the survivors that we could see. All the buildings seemed structurally intact and there were no bed sheets with HELP US messages hanging from windows like there were in many other communities. That was uncommon at that point in the relief effort.
When we flew over on the twenty-ninth, we did not see the yardarm, and the bodies hanging and had received no outward cries for help, so we bumped FantasticLand down the level of priorities. It’s quite simple. When you have places screaming for help and news helicopters flying over and getting hours and hours and hours of footage of the job you’re not doing, it becomes very easy to let lower priorities slide down the list. We stopped flying by FantasticLand, and with the help of their management we made plans to get to them after we had taken care of business in several nearby townships. The risk certainly was there that things could degenerate, but—and I hate to sound callous—we simply did not have the resources to worry about that. If things were going to go bad in FantasticLand, and they obviously did, we were not in a position to provide aid.
When the large Exclamation Point at the center of the park fell, I was alerted to it, and it did seem strange. I passed the information along to the command center and urged someone in the office to contact FantasticLand again to see if they had any information we didn’t have. We never heard back. By that point, FantasticLand had its own internal problems, and it was hard to figure out who was in charge. Yes, the fact that nobody could tell who was in charge meant that FantasticLand was left to sit, and that’s probably part of the reason it wasn’t breached until October 20, with the National Guard going in guns drawn, as they had every right to. Then the media showed up, and heads started to roll.
I’m sorry. That was in terrible taste. I wish I hadn’t said that.
Yes, Mr. Fresno was as helpful as he could be. Mainly, he was in shock.
I will not comment on what happened inside the park. I don
’t know what went on there, and I don’t care to know. I had spent thirty-five days before this FantasticLand situation dealing with one of the worst natural disasters mankind had ever had to deal with, using tools that were invented on the spot because nobody thought anything like this was possible. I understand why you’re focusing on this, Mr. Jakes. It’s sensational, and it’s amazing, and it speaks to the human capacity for evil. I would just beg you, after you’re done with this glitzy story, go out and talk to other people who survived Sadie. You’ll find just the opposite of what you’ll find here. You’ll find so many stories of people who worked and worked to help their fellow man until they literally collapsed, people who went without a drink for days to give their water to dying babies. You will find heroism and horror in equal measure that will put this story of well-off kids killing each other to shame, sir. You will find stories like you wouldn’t believe.
I have enough stories of my own to last a lifetime.
INTERVIEW 3: AARON HOFFMAN
Husband of Suzanne, father of Kendall and Keinan. Evacuated from FantasticLand as Hurricane Sadie hit.
At first, the toughest part of our trip to FantasticLand was just figuring out where to go.
Kendall—he’s seven—was desperate to go to the Pirate Cove first, while Keinan, she was all about the Fairy Prairie. When you first go into the park, you cut right from the Exclamation Point, and you find the Fairies. Left for the Pirates. Suzanne was all like “you kids settle it,” but of course they weren’t going to settle it. They just screamed “Fairies” and “Pirates” at each other until I finally said, “Neither of you are getting your way. We’re going to the robots first,” and then they cried, and my wife shot me a “you’re an asshole” look. I didn’t see her coming up with a better idea.
We’d been saving up for a couple months to go. We didn’t want to go in the summer when it was so damn hot and when there’s a million freakin’ people. Suzanne’s dad, Carl, he had taken Suzanne and her sisters there, like, six times, and she had been on me since Kendall was five, wanting us to go. It was always a money thing. FantasticLand is cheaper than Disney, that’s for sure, but I can think of a couple hundred better ways to spend $3,500. She said I could golf twice, that’s why we decided to eventually go. That and the kids wanted to.
So we get there, and everything you see is “Isn’t it great to be in FantasticLand!” It’s really over the top. They’ve got three huge hotels, the most expensive one is right next to the park, and there are signs all over the place that are like HAPPINESS IS OUR JOB or something like that. We get to the hotel, and Suzanne is thrilled and I’m a little more reserved. I was like, prove it to me if you’re so great. The room was nothing to write home about. I mean, it was clean, and there was a pull-out couch for the kids so we could have our privacy. It was also a five-minute tram ride to the park, but for what we were paying, I don’t know. I expected a big breakfast or something. But there are fairies on the walls and immediately Kendall wants a room with pirates, so we call to the front desk and the best they can do is a pirate pillow. That made him happy for a minute before he lost his mind again.
We were going to be there for a week and we left home on the twelfth. I didn’t want to fly on September 11. Who the hell would? It’s stupid, if you ask me. So we get there on the twelfth and we spend the first night in the pool. You’ve got an entire theme park five minutes outside your door, we pull up at 6:45, and the kids want to swim. I was all for going downstairs, but Suzanne was like, “Let them swim, we’ll hit it tomorrow.” I told her, “We’re paying to go to FantasticLand, let’s go to FantasticLand.” I mean, we can swim at home. They do swim at home, all the damn time. What’s the point of traveling halfway across the damn country to swim in a pool? Let’s go to the park, right? Good thing the hotel had a bar with Heineken on tap, you know what I’m saying.
I have to hand it to them, the park really was something. Suzanne read a blog that had all this insider info on it, and what they tell you to do is follow the Golden Road to the big red Exclamation Point and then you can go right to the Fairies, right and up to the Future World place, straight for the Big Carnival place, left and up for the Super Hero part, and straight left for the Pirates. I like that because it’s simple. You can see the Exclamation Point from anywhere in the park, so you always know about where you are. It’s a good system, and they really did think of everything. We only got lost one time and had to ask an employee about where we were, and he pulled out this interactive phone-looking thing and showed us exactly where we were. It was pretty cool. Then there are these arches in each place that tell you where you are, and the second you’re on the other side of the arches, the whole thing changes. My favorite was when you hit the Pirate Cove, you could immediately hear the ocean. I don’t know how they did it, but a cool breeze hit your face, and you heard the ocean, like I said, and there was music and dancing girls, and it was just great.
But of course the kids were still fighting about what land to go to first. Kendall didn’t want to go to the Fairy Land or whatever you call it at all, and he wouldn’t let it go. He was too old to be such a brat about it so the whole time we’re in Future Land, he was teasing Keinan, saying “We’re going to Pirates next” and “I’m going to buy a sword and stab you,” and then she’d cry. I told him if he kept it up, I’d give him a swat on the behind, and we’d do the Pirates last. That worked, but he sulked all the way through Future Land. The only time he really loosened up was when we went on that ride where you shoot aliens. Have you been on that one? It’s kind of great because they use a lot of black lights so when the stuff pops out at you, it comes out of nowhere. It scared the hell out of Keinan, but Kendall was yelling and shooting and just loving it. He beat my score on that ride.
So we did the Future World, and we did the Circus, which was actually kind of good, and we did the Super Hero Land and we got a lot of great pictures there. Two of the heroes actually picked Keinan up and she was laughing like I hadn’t heard her laugh before. We left that place in a good mood and then it was dinnertime, so we decided to leave for one of our scheduled fancy dinners and then go back to the hotel and finish with the superheroes in the morning. Suzanne was making a map of places we missed so we could double back later on. That was a good plan, but then dinner didn’t go as well that night. We had booked it in this restaurant in the carnival part where there were actual trapeze artists doing their thing overhead as you ate. It was cool, but the kids got distracted and didn’t eat their dinner. I was paying for this big fancy dinner with farm-raised chicken and, like, grapes that grow in only one part of the Himalayas or something, and they were watching women in spandex do flips over their head. Do both, you know? The food was great but we got frustrated really fast.
At that point, there was no mention of the weather at the park or on my phone or anything. I’m not much of a news guy, but I have this weather app on my phone that alerts you if there’s severe weather in the area, but it didn’t go off or send me an alert. There was some talk in the park, stuff like “looks like Miami is in for a doozy, huh?” and I would sort of shrug it off. So, when the kids finally fell asleep, I did turn on the Weather Channel and watched a bit about Hurricane Sadie. They said, basically, don’t mess around with this storm, and I took it serious enough, but it didn’t look like it was going to go near us. Besides, if we got some rain, big deal. We’d have fun and get wet. It’d become a family legend, you know? It would blow over by the time our plane left on the seventeenth, and we’d be home before we had to worry about it. That’s what I was thinking.
The morning of the fourteenth, it’s already cloudy and a little colder, which is fine. We brought jackets. But the kids were still complaining about which park to go to, Pirates or Fairies. We pick back up in Super Hero World, and there weren’t too many people there. Apparently it takes a couple hours to get going, so we ride some of the rides, one of which really freaked out Keinan, and then we had to make the decision. Pirates or Fairies. And they were sti
ll at each other about it. Keinan would start crying, and Kendall would scream, “We’re going to see the Pirates,” and Keinan would cry more, and they wouldn’t listen to any sort of plan about it. Finally, we decided to flip a coin. The kids didn’t want to do that, but I was sick of it, and there wasn’t any other option as far as I could tell other than straight up leaving the park, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. So we flipped a coin, and it came up Pirates, which was probably for the best because Keinan screamed and cried, but two minutes past the Pirate gate she was having fun. Little kids are good like that. They tend not to hold grudges. Kendall, he would have carried that grudge past his high school graduation.
We spent the rest of the day doing Pirate Land and go home happy. We tell Keinan tomorrow is the Fairies, and she is all smiles before she goes to sleep. Kendall was decked out in a hat and a sword, and we got this photo at the Grog Pit where he was surrounded by seven guys dressed head to toe in these great pirate outfits. He slept with a sword that was plastic, but it was kind of sharp. He slept with that. Suzanne and I had some alone time, and we got to sleep about 10:30, which isn’t too bad. Then, at four o’clock in the damn morning, we hear our hotel phone blaring like an alarm. At first, we have no idea what’s going on, and we couldn’t make it stop. It just kept blasting this really irritating sound. It’s the kind of thing that makes your stomach drop because you don’t hear that tone unless someone is dead serious. I had that thing happen where, when I first heard it, I was so disoriented that panic set in for a second, and once you figure out what’s going on you have to deal with your heart pounding so fast that you feel like you’re going to pass out. At one point, Suzanne stuck her head out in the hall and the same alarm with the same tone was blaring. The kids were crying at this point. Suzanne was, too. Then, after about two minutes, it stopped.
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