‘Cosmopolitan’ kitchens pop up to replace lack of government aid in areas hit hardest by Hurricane Sally

Cosmopolitan Kitchen

Candy Williams greets a visitor to the "Cosmopolitan Kitchen" set up in the Fort Morgan peninsula after Hurricane Sally struck the Alabama Gulf Coast. The makeshift kitchen has provided hundreds of meals in recent days as residents along the peninsula have gone without electricity for days. (photo submitted by Joe Emerson).

They start arriving around 5 p.m. every night to the “Cosmopolitan Kitchen,” a makeshift community gathering spot that has been set up underneath a tent behind a vacation rental house within the water-logged Fort Morgan peninsula.

Each night, a meal is served by the resident “chef,” Adam Williams who, himself, is a cook at the Sassy Bass Amazin' Grill in Fort Morgan. Williams' wife, Candy, is a wedding planner who has utilized her professional skills to decorate the “kitchen.”

It opened Wednesday night, less than 12 hours after Hurricane Sally slogged through Alabama’s Gulf Coast and devastated Fort Morgan with powerful winds and flooding. Six days later, on Tuesday, some of the neighborhoods still have standing water on their driveways. Much of the peninsula remains without power, though utility crews have arrived and can be seen throughout the area working to get electricity restored.

The Williams cannot get to their home because it’s flooded. The vacation rental is being lent to them by a friend.

“We had some friends, maybe 12 to 15 who came over,” said Adam Williams, recalling that first night at the kitchen. “We put food together and we all ate and celebrated the beautiful weather. That was the 16th, and we said, ‘man, let’s do this tomorrow and put this stuff together we have that we’d have to throw out.’ We had 65-70 people show up and so we decided we had to feed people. Some of them had food, but they could not cook it.”

It’s taken off from there, with a nightly menu and guests showing up for meals that include Baldwin County Sheriff’s deputies and the utility workers.

The same story is taking place on the opposite side of Baldwin County in the tiny unincorporated town of Seminole that sits on the Alabama-Florida state line. Each night, pastor Kenny Ping is helping to lead an effort that includes gathering up food supplies and cooking meals that are being donated to him. The people are coming in droves. On Monday, 3,150 meals were served to residents who are still without power and struggling with their recovery efforts.

“We have a lot of folks to feed,” said Ping, who also is the chief of Seminole’s volunteer fire department and is pastor of Seminole Holiness Church. “I’ve seen a lot of tears here. There are a lot of saddened people.”

‘It was slow’

The stories in Fort Morgan and Seminole also include a troubling reality for residents in both regions of Baldwin County: The lack of food and supplies that have been passed down from government agencies to the county’s most remote areas. In Seminole’s case, Ping was supposed to be overseeing one of 10 points of distributions for food and supplies provided by emergency management agencies. But ample amounts of those supplies did not start arriving until Tuesday, more than six days after the storm.

For Fort Morgan residents, the drive to the nearest distribution point is more than 20 miles away in Gulf Shores. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sally, traveling along the peninsula’s roads has been dangerous due to the massive flooding, downed trees, and power lines.

“When fuel is already scarce and roads are flooded out, that is an issue,” said Joe Emerson, who is president of Fort Morgan’s civic association.

Mayors in some of the larger cities in coastal Alabama said they did not receive ready-to-eat-meals and supplies like tarps and shovels until Tuesday – long after people were in need of the supplies and around the same time that 80% of Baldwin County’s electricity was restored. In Elberta, Mayor Jim Hamby said he got a shipment of ice sent to the city on Monday and he is not sure what the city will do with it.

“We needed that last week,” Hamby said, adding that the city was appreciative of the supplies sent to the city but that the timing was off. “That should’ve been here 72 hours after the storm, and basically should’ve been en route on Day 1. It was slow.”

In Gulf Shores, where anonymous donors and churches have provided meals, the city spent $30,000 out of its budget to purchase blue tarps and to distribute them to people who are still in need. Tarps are typically provided by emergency management agencies.

“With rain coming this week and Thursday, we went ahead and pulled the trigger and bought the tarps,” said Grant Brown, spokesman for the city. He said the tarps are available to anyone who needs them and are being distributed at Gulf Shores United Methodist Church.

‘Collaboration’

Questions are swirling over how the logistical supply chain of providing items issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency was stalled for days while tens of thousands of people spent were without electricity and searched for a limited supply of protective tarps for their storm-torn roofs.

Mary Hudak, external affairs director with FEMA, said the federal agency established a pre-identified incident support base in Selma ahead of Sally’s arrival last week. She said the agency pre-positioned commodities in Selma in preparation of the unpredictable storm’s landfall that forecasts believed would strike anywhere between coastal Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle.

Hudak said that FEMA provides supplies to the support base depending on the request from the Alabama Emergency Management Agency. According to Rueben Brown, spokesman with FEMA Region 4 – which includes Alabama – Alabama’s EMA requested 345,000 liters of water, 33,000 tarps and 420,000 meals.

Hudak said the request is “pretty typical based on the storm and the resources that are generally provided” to support the state in its recovery efforts.

She said that FEMA doesn’t provide ice any longer following storm events and has not done so for more than a decade.

Greg Robinson, spokesman with the Alabama EMA, said the ice deliveries – which are managed by the state and local EMA’s -- are based on a need from the previous day and is dependent on the number of people who are without electricity.

“There is a collaboration,” said Hudak. “They are getting information from the electrical co-op, the power company and others based on estimated return of service.”

Other projections are made in determining how much quantity of certain items are needed, such as meals. Those projections are based on the population’s characteristics such as the percentage of people who are elderly. A surplus of supplies, according to FEMA, can be utilized by local agencies the next time there is a disaster they are in need.

What is unclear is why the supplies took so long in getting to South Baldwin County, and long after makeshift kitchens popped up in driveways or church parking lots.

Robinson said there are points of distribution set up throughout Baldwin County, and that they are managed by the counties. He said the state “helps fill the gaps with resources,” but notes that the distribution system includes “exhausting” local resources first before the state steps in. He said the state delivers meals and supplies to a central point of distribution, which is in Robertsdale.

“If the county asked for support in the points of distribution … we will surely help out,” said Robinson. “But the primary responsible (party) for distributing commodities is that we rely on the locals.”

‘Critical failure’

State Senator Chris Elliott, R-Daphne, said a lot of the commodities had been requested of the state on Wednesday, right after the storm hit. He said that resources “were throttled back” by the state, which meant that “that fewer resources were sent than what was requested, or that those resources were not sent at all.”

Sherry-Lee Bloodworth Botop, a spokeswoman for the Baldwin County Commission, said that Items were requested by Baldwin County EMA beginning on Wednesday, after the storm hit. She said the state has been communicating with designated staff about the supply distribution chain on a regular basis, and commodities received have been distributed to the point of distribution sites immediately upon receipt in coordination with emergency managers on the ground.

“Assets that should have been on the ground a day or possibly two days after the storm only arrived five days after the storm,” said Elliott, a former Baldwin County commissioner.

Elliott visited the Seminole fire station on Monday afternoon at a site where Ping was supposed to be receiving meals and supplies from the state EMA. He said that when he got there, “I saw a few cases of water, some of which I brought in the back of my truck directly. No tarps, a few bags of ice and some (National) Guardsmen who were milling around. It was problematic.”

Some parts of Baldwin County have since closed their points of distribution sites, such as Fairhope, where residents lined the streets late Tuesday to give a celebratory sendoff to utility crew workers who fully restored power on Tuesday.

Related: Hurricanes bring heroes. Here are a few I found this week

But in Seminole, Elliott said, “there are clearly people in need.”

“There was a line (of vehicles) down Highway 90,” he said, who added that he contacted Alabama EMA Director Brian Hastings to request that the state release more of the goods from the Selma location to Baldwin County. By Tuesday afternoon, the site was filled with tents and meals and tarps, “just as it should be,” Elliott said.

“The problem with this is that those assets arrived four to five days later than they should have,” he said. “Fairhope might have shut their point of distribution site down, but Seminole has hundreds standing in line. People needed the assets.”

He said the faith-based organizations, restaurants and banks have helped fill the void in assisting residents with meals and supplies.

“This is what we have to look at as an after-action report (on Hurricane Sally) is why the state was throttling the resources back or not sending them at all,” said Elliott. “That’s a critical failure in emergency management.”

Redistribution center’

Meanwhile, the state delivered 7,500 blue tarps to Baldwin County on Monday or five days after Hurricane Sally slammed into the area and following a soggy and wet weekend in the Gulf Coast. Robinson said that 7,500 more tarps will be “delivered soon.”

Brown, with Gulf Shores, said believes the large geographical size of Baldwin County has led to the slowness in the response to outlying areas of the county that are not within an incorporated city. Baldwin County is the largest county by area in Alabama, encompassing a total of 2,027 square miles. It is larger than Rhode Island.

“The county is so large and there are so many areas that are remote,” said Brown. “It took a while for the county EMA to define and look where they needed to get the most aid to and then get it to the points of distribution.”

Brown said that the county’s EMA has been “great in their response,” but noted that churches have “ramped up and jumped in” to help whenever needed. He said that cities like Gulf Shores and Orange Beach have been able to step up and assist their residents with anything that they have needed.

“Has it been perfect? No,” said Brown. “Has it been good? Absolutely. People are getting things in our community. We are doing well. About 85% of our city has power restored. It’s been a fast recovery effort within the last week.”

In Orange Beach, city officials are loading up the government-provided supplies shipped to them on Tuesday and delivering them to Fort Morgan, where they are most needed. The drive from Orange Beach is about 40 minutes.

Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon said the city has more than 80% of its power restored, and that there is not as much of a need for the items the city received on Tuesday.

“We are a redistribution center,” said Kennon. “We feel like we can help because we have so many resources. We are at 85% (with electricity restored). I feel bad (for the more remote areas) that they cannot get a hot meal. We are packing up the hot food and taking it out to those places. We are talking thousands of meals per day.”

Cosmopolitan Kitchen

Inside the "Cosmopolitan Kitchen" in Fort Morgan. Pictured are Adam Williams (far left) and his wife, Candy, with Joe Emerson and two Baldwin County Sheriff's deputies. (photo submitted by Joe Emerson).

Back at the Cosmopolitan Kitchen, Andy and Candy Williams say that they have no intention of slowing down nightly meals and plan to continue cooking as long as the need is there. Beyond the food, people have told the couple that they are happy to have camaraderie with others after long days of cleaning up properties.

The couple spent $185 of their own money at a grocery store in Gulf Shores on food items that were cooked up as part of one of the evening meals within the past week. Others who are joining in the nightly meals have donated money, and Fort Morgan restaurants like Sassy Bass and Tacky Jack’s have donated hamburgers and sandwiches.

“Anyone who pulls up will get fed,” said Adam Williams.

On Thursday, the couple will cook up a Thanksgiving dinner to celebrate the hard week of recovery. Turkey will be replaced by chicken breasts. Candy Williams plans to make a stuffing, green beans, and a sweet potato casserole.

“I’m hopeful someone will bring pumpkin pies,” she said.

Related: ‘The scariest adventure:’ Riding out Hurricane Sally

Power outages compound Hurricane Sally agony in coastal Alabama

Long lines for fuel, boats damaged: Coastal Alabama cleans up from Sally

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