Companies take hands-on approach to hurricane relief

Hancock, a member of Prime Inc.’s senior management team, doesn’t know how much it will cost to fix the broken complex, much of it underwater, or when it will reopen. It was a painful sight for Hancock and his boss, Prime owner Robert Low, who owns the Palace Casino.

But what really affected Hancock was turning away a mother with a hungry 6-month-old child after emptying 11 tractor-trailers full of food and other supplies Sept. 3 in Biloxi.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Hancock said. “There were some real heart-wrenching moments.”

Hancock, Low and more than 30 other Prime and Killian Construction Co. employees disregarded Federal Emergency Management Agency warnings about the unstable environment Katrina left in its wake and ventured from Springfield with about 250,000 pounds of provisions.

Prime footed the entire bill, undisclosed by Hancock, thanks in part to the voluntary cancellation of the annual $40,000 Prime employee picnic that was slated to take place in Springfield the same day.

“We discussed it and decided we needed to move now,” Hancock said.

Once in Mississippi, the No. 1 objective was to help Palace personnel victimized by the storm. It took just three hours to help about 1,600 people, including distributing paychecks to employees. The company is determining on a case-by-case basis how long pay will continue.

Prime wasn’t the only area business to take a hands-on approach to relief efforts.

Ride The Ducks founder Bob McDowell and five other volunteers took two of the Branson company’s amphibious vehicles, owned by Herschend Family Entertainment Corp., to New Orleans on Sept. 2.

Though McDowell had declined using his Ducks in relief efforts for other natural disasters, the magnitude of Katrina’s destruction compelled him and his colleagues to travel south.

“We knew we had to step up,” McDowell said.

He and his crew helped transport people to hospitals and from flooded houses, both in remote areas and in the heart of the historic city, while dead bodies floated past in contaminated water.

“They had obviously been there for a while,” McDowell said of the bodies. “Some of them were tied to a post or cars so they wouldn’t float away. They were bloated and very odorous. It was very difficult.”

Another Springfield business waited to hear if one of its own made it through the storm.

Karen Utterback, who was working remotely in Hattiesburg, Miss., as vice president of clinical strategy for McKesson Corp.’s Springfield office, is safe in a Springfield apartment with one of her three children after surviving Katrina.

“It was pretty scary,” said Utterback, who lived through three hurricanes, each a Category 3, before the Category 4 Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

“There was no comparison between those and this one.”

Utterback’s husband and two other children are still in Mississippi, living with family and unable to communicate very well with her.

Meanwhile, McKesson employees are holding dress-down days and pancake and sausage breakfasts in fund-raising efforts for hurricane relief.

With one day left to collect, more than $6,000 had been received in cash and supplies, according to Deb Davis, a processing analyst who’s heading up the efforts.

“I’ve been very proud to be part of not only McKesson as a whole, but of this Springfield business group,” she said. “They’ve been very generous.”

Meanwhile, Ride The Ducks’ McDowell is back in Branson with a unique perspective on what it meant to help Katrina’s victims.

“It just put everything in perspective carrying all those people out in those three days,” said McDowell, who founded Ride The Ducks in 1976. “It kind of had a lot higher value than all the work we’ve done for almost 30 years.”