San Diego volunteers coordinating freelance airlift to Gulf Coast

By SETH HETTENA
Associated Press Writer
8 September 2005

SAN DIEGO (AP) - The jet was about to pick up a group of Hurricane Katrina evacuees and bring them to California on Thursday, but there was a hitch: An elderly New Orleans woman who wanted to get on the San Diego flight couldn't make it to the airport.

This was the kind of problem Tara Hollier loves to solve. A week ago, Hollier was shuttling her well-heeled clients around the country through her company, Executive Jet Services Inc. in Carlsbad. These days, she's coordinating a volunteer airlift using mostly donated jets to ship supplies to battered Gulf Coast states.

Over the past week, Hollier estimated she had sent 12 to 15 jets to the Gulf Coast loaded with diapers, food, clothes, water, insulin and other supplies. On Thursday, she was busy lining up a Boeing 727 to fly about 60 New Orleans residents left homeless by the storm from Baton Rouge, La., to San Diego. The evacuees will be bused to the Dream Center near downtown Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, workers were lining up boxes of diapers in an airplane hangar at San Diego's Lindbergh Field. Once the 727 landed, it would be loaded up with supplies and sent back to Baton Rouge.

The all-volunteer effort has tapped a rich outpouring of goodwill by quickly shipping relief supplies to a battered region where the country's traditional relief operations have been painfully slow to respond.

"We've been able to mobilize overnight and get aid to where it's needed, without the red tape," said Dan Miller, a 38-year-old volunteer working to offload the supplies in Gulfport, Miss.

It was unclear, however, whether all the supplies were getting distributed once the planes landed. Miller said that while some of the supplies did reach the needy, others did not. He said there was a need for forklifts to offload the supplies and small trucks to transport them. There also was a need, Miller said, for people with medical expertise and construction workers and home-building supplies.

The flight center for the operation is a small windowless conference room at Jimsair Aviation Services at San Diego's airport where Hollier and a group of 20-year-olds worked cell phones, Blackberries and computers that never seemed to stop chirping or vibrating. One of the calls was from United Parcel Service Inc., which had a plane to donate.

"I love logistics. I love coordinating things. And I love trying to make situations work," said Hollier, who was 11 when she began dispatching planes in her father's aviation business. "It's like a big puzzle. You just have to put it all together and it's just so fun, so challenging."

The effort got kickstarted Sept. 2 when David Perez, a San Diego businessman frustrated by the sluggish pace of the recovery effort, called Hollier and told her he needed a plane.

She chartered him a Boeing 737, which he loaded with vanloads of supplies purchased at Costco. Two days later, the plane brought 79 storm victims to San Diego. Word spread and groups and individuals stepped forward to offer up supplies while corporations and individuals lent their planes to the relief effort.

Sometimes the puzzle doesn't come together. No one got aboard a jet Hollier sent to Houston earlier this week when the two families slated to be picked up couldn't be located. Thursday presented another tough puzzle: An Oceanside man had called and wanted to bring his grandmother and aunt from Louisiana to San Diego. But the grandmother was in New Orleans, with a bad hip and no means to get to the Baton Rouge airport.

"Where is your grandmother?" Hollier asked him by phone. "We have an airplane that is going to be in Baton Rouge in probably about an hour."

Hollier turned to Perez in Louisiana, who got the Sheriff's department to send a helicopter to pick her up.

"I told him he's Superman," she said. "He puts his mind to something, it just happens."

The woman turned out to be too sick to fly.

So, Perez and Hollier started looking for an air ambulance.