Interview with James P. McCoy (DMV) conducted by Alisa Moeller November 7, 1992, Miami, FL . Hurricane Andrew - Remains of a furniture warehouse west of Whispering Pines.Courtesy National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Adminstration Photo Library:

McCoy: When did you first realize that hurricane Andrew might hit Miami?

Moeller: I would say the Saturday before the storm.  My family and I were in North Carolina. We were in Ashville, and we were watching the news, we had been following it during the week and we were hoping that the storm would go North but it looked like it was going to head right for us Saturday; so that was the first time we were aware of it.

McCoy: What preparations did you make?

Moeller: We drove home from Ashville on Sunday morning, we left at seven and we got here at seven. We had bought supplies along the way and we made it here in 12 hours and at that time I put boarded shutters up on my house, I have precut shutters with studs on the outside of the house, you put those on and then screw those on and I cover all of the windows in my house. We filled up containers with water, we had picked up enough batteries, we really had enough batteries in the house anyhow.  My mother-in-law had put up food for us because she lives here in Miami.  That was pretty much our preparation.

McCoy: What about for the clinic itself?

Moeller: The clinic preparations my partner had done while I was gone. What he had done was, we have bars on the outside windows so we really didn't feel that we needed shutters.  We took home what animals we could take home, our personal animals or blood donors or something like that to our house. In fact my dogs had been boarding here while I was in North Carolina and I took them home to my house and a couple others there. We made sure that things were unplugged, like computers system and things that power surges would effect and we just blocked up the place, its a pretty sturdily built building.

McCoy: Did you need any extra supplies here in anticipation of the hurricane?

Moeller: No.

McCoy: Who was with you during the hurricane?

Moeller: My wife, my two daughters were with us at the house.  My parents have their own house and they had boarded up at their house, that's my mother and father, and they had secured their house. My mother-in-law lived in an apartment building that was pretty well secure all inland, not in evacuation areas so we felt like they were okay. My partner lives about a block from me and again he's not in an evacuation area and he had boarded up the day previously. In fact, when I came home he had three or four people that worked in the clinic that met me at the house to help me put up the shutters and he came over himself as well so that was a big help. I was able to get things up in about three hours.  I was boarded up by ten o'clock.

McCoy: What happened to you during the hurricane?

Moeller: Well, honestly I slept through the hurricane, but my wife was awake all night long, so were my daughters, they paced through the house, heard a lot of noise. There was one area where the shutters don't come together real well and they could see out into the street area.  They watched the storm. They listened to the radio, we had watched the news until about midnight on the television and during night time they would listen to the radio. They would listen to WIOD, that's the station they would listen to.  They didn't watch television. I think our power went out around four something in the morning, between four and five in the morning so we had battery radios.

McCoy: What did you do right after the hurricane? What was the first thing that you thought about?

Moeller: The first thing I thought about?  Having been through two storms down here in Miami.  I was raised in Miami and I can remember the "60" storm and the "64" storm.  I was away at college in 1965. Those storms I can remember being in my house with my parents and the next morning going out and there being a lot of tree damage around the house, so that's what I was looking for the next morning.  We basically evaluated the damage that was to trees in our yard and there were some trees down. I luckily had had the larger trees in my yard trimmed back during the summer.  I try to do that every summer and this summer I had done it so the big trees that might have thrown limbs on the house were cut back.  The smaller trees and my neighbors had blown down and we evaluated that. Then we came here to the clinic here to see what kind of damage was done here and there was none.  We took care of the animals the rest of the way, and then I went over to my brother-in-laws house who lives in Bay Point.  He happened to be out of town, he and his wife, and they had a large tree that had fallen on the edge of the house and one in the front of the house had fallen on their cars.  So we went over there to evaluate what kind of damage they had and to call them.  Thay live in Nantucket, so we called him...

McCoy: How was your staff?

Moeller: The staff, they all live within the immediate area or realitively close so being in the Northeast section of Miami they had lost their power.  They had some trees down. One of my employees had some considerable number of trees down because he has a large acre lot up in the North end of the area, so some trees had fallen on some of the fences in his yard, but there was no measured damage to anybody as far as none of our employees were hurt or any of our employee's family members were hurt.  We don't have any employees that live in the South end so we were okay there.

McCoy: Did you recieve any help after the hurricane?  What was the first week like?

Moeller: No, we came in here to the buisness and for the first couple of days we just basically took care of the animals that were here. We weren't recieving any animals.  We had a couple of emergencies that got through to us because one of my phones is not on electric, it's on the regular line and our phone system was working, we never lost that. I have a Merlin system which runs on electricity and we lost all of that, but there was a third phone and that one still was working so we had a couple of emergencies to take care of through that phone.  I never lost my phone at home so people were able to get in touch with me there.  The day after the storm I went down and bought a generator from the local Ace Hardware and I got some gasoline. I drove to Hialeah and got gasoline because there was power on in Hialeah and there was quite a long line of people that were doing the same thing, so I got five gallons of gas and got the generator hooked up.  I would come over here during the day and we would run the generator during the day to try and keep our vaccines as cold as possible and keep our refrigerated supplies as cold as possible and to take care of running the phones because we did some temporary emergency work for a while.  To take care of running the lights, running the microscopes, just the bare minimum that we needed to get along. We had no air-conditioning or basically ceiling lights because what we would do was we would hook up the generator to extension cords and run extension cords.  And then Bruce and I would take the generator home at night and he'd run it in his house one night and I'd run it in mine.  I ended up the next day buying another generator, a smaller one so that I would use that at home and Bruce used one at his home and I used the big one here and at my house also. It got pretty hot in the evening at the house and my wife got pretty uncomfortable and couldn't sleep so the generator helped.  At the house, the generator basically powered the television so that we could see what was going on.  It  powered our refrigerator so we could keep food cold and it powered a fan and we would run it during the day and we would have neighbors bring food over and keep it in our refrigerator and then in the evening time we'd cut it off and the refrigerator would stay pretty cold during the night and we would cook on barbecue grills and eat cold foods, stuff like that.

McCoy: Has hurricane Andrew significantly changed your plans for the future?

Moeller: Not particularly other than I probably will get some other type shutters for my house, I have wooden shutters now and I am probably going to get metal shutters that are easier for me to put up as a one-man person.  The wooden shutters are difficult, I used to have my son down here to help me put them up, during David in 1980, but he's away at college now and I don't want to feel like I've got to depend on employees to come over. So I'm going to get light aluminum or light steel shutters that slide into grooves, or panel shutters so that I can put them up by myself so that I don't have to depend upon somebody else. As far as the clinic here we feel like we're pretty well. We donated the large generator that we had here to a church in South Miami after we got our power back on but we've kept the smaller generator and we're going to keep it for if we have another storm. We haven't thought about getting one in the past but we're going to keep this one. I have a feeling, like everybody else in Miami, that we'll probably take hurricanes a lot more seriously than we have in the past.

McCoy: When did you first come back to work and get the clinic up and functioning?

Moeller: I would say two days after the storm. We started taking patients, we'd run the generator and we'd run until early in the afternoon. We got our power back on the Saturday after the storm, and we got the power back on at my house on the Saturday after the storm too.

McCoy: What was coming back like? How did the hurricane impact the type of emergencies that were coming in?

Moeller: We saw some trauma cases initially, they had stepped on debris and cut themselves. There were animals that had cut themselves, trauma-cut cases.  I didn't see any animals that had been hit by flying debris outside. I saw a lot of digestive upsets, they were cultured some animals and found out that it was a closterium? organism that we were culturing.  A lot of animals had vomiting and diarrhea after the storm and we think it was from drinking the water. They picked up this organism where there was stagnant water outside that they drank or even though everybody was supposed to be boiling their water or running it through a filtration system the pets were not getting that.  People were giving them regular water.  That was the thing, we found out that treating it symptomatic ally and with a specific type of antibiotic almost all of them got over it.

McCoy: That is something that I wouldn't have thought about and I'm sure that a lot of people were giving their animals tap water.

Moeller: Sure, even though people were trying to, as much as possible, keep the bottled water, their pets probably got ahold of some.

McCoy:   Were there any changes in the numbers of strays, animals being taken to shelters or abandoned puppies and kittens?

Moeller: We have two animals here that we took in after the storm that were directly related to animals picked up in South Miami.  I went down and worked at the free vet. clinic at Campbell Drive and US-1 and I brought home an animal from there, it had a broken leg. The people had brought the dog in to put it to sleep and couldn't afford to take care of the dog. My initial thoughts were that the dog probably didn't get a lot of care before the storm but now that he had the fractured leg that was more than they could handle and they decided to put the dog to sleep. We still have the dog and we're trying to find a home for him, we've fixed the leg and we did surgery on that, we just have not placed him yet. There were a couple of homes but he just hasn't worked out, but he will. There was one other dog there that was brought in by people who had found him and just couldn't keep him, we placed that dog.  I can tell you that I had a lot of people that did come in after the storm who said that they had found animals and they had decided to keep them so we gave them a complete. So there were a good many animals that were found, particularly in the South end of town. When I worked down in Homestead I can tell you that there were a lot of animals that were picked up as strays in the Homestead and South Miami area that were taken to a facility that was set up on Chrome Avenue. There were a lot of animals that were taken in there and placed either in Broward County or Palm Beach County or they were placed in Dade County with different people; Animal Control or Humane Society and there were a lot of animal activists that had participated in working at Chrome. Some of the animals that had come into the two free clinics, there was one on 184th Street and US-1 and one at Campbell Drive, which I think is 204th Street and US-1, a lot of those people who brought animals in that they wanted destroyed or that they found and they couldn't keep them, they were given immediate emergency care there and then they were shipped out to Chrome where they were cared for until they were placed in homes, some of them were put to sleep if they were to badly damaged.  When I worked at the Chrome clinic we saw some trauma cases, most  of the trauma cases were over with by then; I worked the following weekend after the storm because all week I was trying to run the clinic here.  Most of the trauma cases that I saw down there was a lot of eye problems, ulcers or animals that had received nicks and cuts.  I saw a lot of digestive upsets.  I saw a lot of things that weren't storm injuries, people came in because they wanted free veterinary care and were not storm related, just problems that had happened probably before the storm.  Those are the things that I can think of off of the top of my head that we probably had more than anything else.  I would say that my initial feelings are that there are a lot of animals that were picked up that were stray animals, I can tell you that probably a good many of those were animals that were abandoned in the storm because they were lost from their owners homes, got lost or the owners had to leave because of damage and couldn't find their pets.  Some of those were animals that were abandoned because their owners felt that they couldn't take care of them, but there were a large number of those that were stray and indigents before the storm, that were loose dogs running on the street or running in the Homestead or South Miami area that never were in homes or had veterinary care that were scooped up and taken with the rest of these animals, and those animals were probably helped. Some of them were placed in homes, some of them had to be euthanised for one reason or another.

McCoy: So some of the animals may actually have benefited from the storm?

Moeller: Yes, they would have been because everything was picked up.

McCoy: Is there anything that you learned from the storm that you would like to see instituted in the case of future emergencies?

Moeller: Right now the South Florida Veterinary Medical Association along with the Broward County and Palm Beach Association are in the process of working with the American Animal Hospital Association and probably people in other parts of the country like South Carolina, North Carolina, Cuba were trying to put together a plan of action because we were called for, we were not prepared for the size of the disaster and the extent of it in anyway whatsoever and how it is going to affect veterinarians and pet population and there are some specific things that we've learned from the storm as an association because there were a lot of people who came down and volunteered their time from all over the country and from these local associations here in South Florida and there were some things that we've learned that we want to pass on to other places about what we're going to do, how things are supposed to be mobilized, how things will be set up as far as type of care, indigent care, things like that are probably going to benefit in the future.  So there will be a better plan of action in the future. At least it will be down on paper, I don't know that there will be people hired to be around but I think that if we do have a storm coming in the future that we will mobilize certain people in expectation. I hope we never have a storm of this magnitude again.

McCoy: Were there any visible changes in your colleagues? Were they drawn together by the storm ?

Moeller: In my colleagues case we all work together, we have a family here, that's the way we look at all of our employees.  You feel that way about each other and we all helped each other out.  Some of the employees didn't get their power up until later and what we did is gave them our generators, we would help them cut trees and they would help us cut trees, we made sure that if they needed extra time off to take care of their families or whatever it may be they did that. We all worked together. I saw the best and I saw the worst of people when the storm occurred.  As far as my employees are concerned, I saw the best of people.  Working in the South Florida area, there were thousands of people that went out of their way to help other people, they donated their time. One of the things that we found after the storm was that there were thousands of people who donated their time but that there wasn't much organization of telling them where to go, we were not prepared for that. A lot of people, once they were told what to do and they got organization, things got mobilized and got along well.  There were people who really worked hard to help fellow people out. We also saw, and the stories are numerous, they're in the paper, of the worst too. People took advantage of people and I know as many of those stories as you do, greed is one of those situations that if people are greedy they're going to take advantage of it when they get every opportunity and there are a lot of people who did during the storm, but that's one of those things that there's not much we can change human nature, we consider that as part of the game.  But I think we're probably more positive when we want to look at it we're really proud of our community and the way that people worked together. I'm always proud of my staff, the people locally here and my family too as a unit in our neighborhood. When the power was out people came out of their houses and they talked to each other like it probably was when my parents were growing up. There was no air-conditioning running so people came out because it was cooler outside.  Other than a television, if somebody had their generator running, people would sit outside and talk.  There was no television to distract that, people communicated, people went out of their way to help each other.  When you got a group of people together, someone would go get ice and they would bring ice back for other people or somebody would have a refrigerator working and they would help store food or if you had a barbecue and you had your grill going people would come over and cook their food on your grill and then take it home and eat for the next couple of days the food that they had cooked, they could just keep it cool.  Everybody got along real well, you got a chance to get to know people a little bit more. If you eliminate the air-conditioning and you eliminate the television, people find that they need the entertainment and the communication and friendship of other people and they'll come out and talk and that is neat.  In my neighborhood it was nice, crime was not a factor in my neighborhood like it was in South Miami. That's one of the worst things that I saw and I guess the one that I was the most disappointed with. There was a curfew and the police made a point of adhering to that.  I would walk my dogs in the evening with my wife and the people that were out and that curfew was adhered to by most of the population.

McCoy: You had mentioned to me earlier over the phone a doctor that you knew down in the Southern area that had his clinic completely wiped out, are the veterinarians getting together and trying to help out those who were wiped out in any way?

Moeller: Most of the people who sell drugs and supplies have donated supplies and drugs to try and get them back on their feet. There were numerous association meetings at which veterinarians donated their time to work down at the free clinics and then also to help other veterinarians to get back on line.  One of the things that we found was that once the veterinarians in South Miami that were not devastated and destroyed and put out of business, once they got their clinics going again, then we tried to funnel out business back into them and not to use the free clinics so that they would be able to employ their employees and get back to work.  There were some bad feelings somewhat from some of the animal activists, we felt like we as South Florida veterinarians that manned the free clinics down there that once the mobile clinics got back to work that we felt like that we didn't need to man those clinics anymore, that the veterinarians that were down there would take care of it. We also set up a program so that those who couldn't afford veterinary care, because of storm injuries, because they had their house devastated, because they had their business devastated couldn't afford it, that there was money coming in on a national level.  There was a lot of national money donated, that was funneled to veterinarians to pay for costs for these people.  The local veterinarians, most of them, some didn't, were willing to donate their services to these indigent people and the cost of their equipment, supplies and whatever it was was paid for by this fund that came in.  So we felt that we provided indigent care and we also had these people back on line and we wanted to send business there. Well, some of these animal activists felt that we shouldn't close down these free clinics, that there should be free veterinary care for everybody there that needed it, they didn't feel like people should have to go back to regular veterinarians and there was some strife about that, it's been pretty well worked out, I think, but like anything there's going to be problems.  Right now most of the clinics down there are back on line, there were a few clinics that were completely destroyed, wiped out. Some of those people have walked away from those clinics, they're probably going to open up elsewhere, some of those people have rented space elsewhere, some have got trailers and set them up behind their buildings and they're working out of those trailers until they can get their buildings, most of them had insurance so that they can build their facility back again. A good many of those veterinarians had their homes destroyed and they're dealing with that just like all of the other veterans in South Miami. There is money coming in from a state fund that was donated from all over the country as well as veterinarians in the state of Florida, that is more directly to veterinarians to help them with their problems, not for the stray animals but for them, to help them get back on their feet and open for business, basic supplies and equipment and things that insurance is not paying for to help them with their homes. Because there's about seven or eight veterinarians down in South Miami that were completely wiped out.