Tsunami-hit region a long way from recovery

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 21, 2005): Residents of the areas where the tsunami hit last December are still in need of help to get back on their feet, a Catholic bishop from southern India told the Scarborough Rotary Club Tuesday.

Bishop Yoohanon “John” Mar Chrysostom Kalloor, bishop of Marthandam, in the southernmost district at the very southern tip of India, said he was two miles from the shore on Dec. 26, 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck his area.

He was in the middle of ordaining two young men into the priesthood, and went to the coast. “It was a tragic situation,” Kalloor said. He said he didn't see "even a single human life” in the first village he went to, struck by a 200-foot-high wall of water generated by an earthquake below the ocean floor off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, about 2,000 miles away.

In his local area, about 3,000 people were killed, most of them Christian, he said. “It was a massive burial.”

Local and international aid agencies started 42 camps for people displaced by the tsunami, which ruined homes and other buildings, destroyed boats and fishing equipment, and caused people to fear the sea from which many of them earn their living.

“Under my care, there were 5,000 people in four camps,” Kalloor said.

He told of a conversation he had with one boy whose entire family had died, and whose house had collapsed.

“He came and told me, ‘Bishop, I don’t want your food. I don’t want your clothes. I don’t want your money,’” Kalloor said. When Kalloor asked him why, “He said, ‘I want to die.’”

“I talked with him for hours,” brought the boy back to his own residence and helped take care of him for the next month and a half while the boy got his life back together.

In his village, the tsunami orphaned 150 children and widowed 50 women. “That is one small village,” Kalloor said, out of the vast area affected by the disaster.

But the need in his community did not begin with the tsunami.

As many as 700 children need money to help pay for school uniforms, shoes, textbooks and bookbags.

Every morning when he finishes Mass or prayers, “there are so many people waiting for me to ask some favors,” Kalloor said.

“Leprosy is a big problem.” He was once a director of a sanitorium that housed 4,000 lepers, who are often disowned by their families and left homeless.

“I got them under the bridges of the roads. They didn’t have homes,” he said.

In his diocese, which he has led since 1998, Kalloor has started a university and a home for lepers, as well as a new orphanage – in addition to the existing four – to house orphans from the tsunami.

That is part of the relief effort, which began with giving every family a small room in large tents, and providing them with food, water and sanitation.

The next step toward recovery is just beginning, he said, with plans to purchase fishing boats and nets.

“Ninety-some percent of the people who died in this area are poor fishermen,” Kalloor said. “Some of them are afraid to go to the sea,” but it is their best hope for providing for their families.

The final stage of relief is to build homes for the families, on land the government has purchased a ways back from the shore.

“Each day, I pray never to see such a scene again” as he saw after the tsunami struck, Kalloor said.

Editorial: Home for hospice

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 21, 2005): The people working to bring a hospice to Scarborough probably hadn’t expected to encounter much objection to their idea. After all, each of us will die someday, and many of us – myself included – have a relative or friend who used hospice services before dying.

Hospice of Southern Maine has run into a little bit of resistance, mostly residents concerned about traffic on the small roads off Maple Avenue, including Hunnewell Road, where Agnes Desfosses has donated nearly five acres to the agency.

Traffic is a valid concern, and a common one, about new developments, whether residential, commercial or a bit of both, like this one. Hospice organizers plan to provide housing for up to 16 patients, as well as space for family members to stay, and so it sounds a bit residential, perhaps along the lines of an apartment building. But it will also be a non-profit health care building, with doctors, nurses and other professionals helping to care for the bodies and minds of the patients there.

The Town Council is working on a provision that would allow a hospice building in any residential area of town – while leaving hospices barred from commercial and industrial zones.

It would seem better for everyone, not least the patients and their families, to place a hospice in a neighborhood than a business park, even if neighborhood roads were not originally designed to handle the hospice’s additional traffic.

And it’s not unreasonable for residents to be concerned about the potential effects of such a project on their surroundings. It’s likely this type of objection would be raised in any neighborhood the hospice group selected.

This particular neighborhood has long been vocally concerned about traffic in their neighborhood. In late 2002, they successfully lobbied the Town Council to slow down traffic in their area, getting approval for the installation of new stop signs that they hoped would discourage people from cutting through the area to avoid the Oak Hill intersection.

Having recently reclaimed their roads from speeding short-cutters, they are rightly wary of having more traffic come through. The hospice will bring visitors, staff and deliveries. A traffic study would be able to tell more accurately than anyone’s speculation – either the residents’ or hospice organizers’ – how much more traffic it would all mean, and such a study should be conducted before the planning process gets much farther along.

The neighborhood is a quiet residential space, with children playing outside, and where adults jog, walk and cycle. The residents there have a right to that environment, just as the hospice group has a right to propose to the town their project and potential remedies for any negative impacts the project might have.

One possible solution could be to have the hospice group install sidewalks in nearby areas where pedestrian traffic is common. Sidewalks are missing from the neighborhoods along and adjoining Maple Avenue, and could provide increased safety for the runners, walkers and others using the roads there. They would also narrow the roads even more, which could tend to slow traffic.

There may be a place that would be better in an ideal world, but in this, the real world, five acres at no cost provide the perfect spot as far as the hospice is concerned. Buying a similarly sized lot in Scarborough or elsewhere in Southern Maine would be very expensive, perhaps prohibitively so, given the hospice’s desire to be close to major roads like the Maine Turnpike and Route 1.

Hospice is an important aspect of health care, and a crucial support for dying people and their loved ones. The neighbors’ concerns are not insurmountable, and the need for hospice is great. We hope that the hospice group can work with the town and residents to find a way to bring hospice services to Southern Maine.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Keeping the ships from the shore

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (July 14, 2005): Four men and one woman are in charge of keeping the largest ships in Portland Harbor safe and sound as they come in and out of one of the busiest ports on the eastern seaboard.

Two of the Portland Pilots – one an active pilot with 43 years’ experience and another who retired four years ago after 43 years of his own – talked about their work recently at the Portland Harbor Museum.

The pilot company, a private firm not affiliated with any government organization, was founded in the early part of the 20th century, and “you might call it, in some respects, a closed company,” said Capt. Granville “Pete” Smith, a retired pilot who lives in Cumberland Foreside.

The pilots, all graduates of Maine Maritime Academy, hold master’s – also called captain’s – licenses from the U.S. Coast Guard and have undergone three years of training – at a ship-handling school in Europe, and five schools in the U.S. for “what-if scenarios” – and then 250 trips in and out of the harbor with other pilots.

After that comes a Coast Guard pilot exam, only part of which is to draw a chart of the entire harbor from memory, ensuring that instant recall of any point in the area is possible when the pilot is conning a ship on its way into or out of the harbor.

“There’s no chance for error,” said Capt. S.J.S. “Sandy” Dunbar.

Even after passing the test, the Board of Harbor Commissioners can ask for more training before granting a license.

“Once you get the license you get into our organization and for the first time in three years, you start earning money,” Dunbar said.

Time and tides

The formalized training is just one way their profession has changed with time.

But some things never change. The pilots work on 10-day shifts, when they are on call at any hour.

“It’s almost like being a fireman. You don’t know when that bell is going to ring,” Dunbar said. In the old days, they had to stay near the phone all the time. “Now, with pagers and cell phones, life is almost human.”

If one job comes too soon after another, the pilots may not go home. Instead, they may take a “kink” in the office on Union Wharf, or on the pilot boat. “Kinks are a little bit longer than a nap,” Dunbar said.

Pilots still meet their ships at the same place, outside West Cod and Corwin’s ledges, southeast of Two Lights, though there’s no longer a lightship there, and not even the 40-foot buoy that once marked it. Now the sea buoy – designated with the letter P, and in the phonetic alphabet of marine communications called the “Papa buoy” – is the meeting point.

It was chosen originally because it has “deep water, plenty of maneuvering room,” Smith said. “From the Papa buoy, it’s almost a straight shot right into Portland Head.”

But the way they get there is now very different.

“When we came in, we actually both started when there was a schooner as a pilot vessel,” Dunbar said.

The 70-foot schooner would motor out of the dock, sail out of the harbor to the lightship – where the sea buoy is now – and pause about 50 yards from the ship in need of a pilot. The pilot would jump into a dory and be rowed – or later, motored – to the side of the ship.

“That was a whole new experience, especially in bad weather,” Dunbar said. “The training was getting aboard – just getting to work.”

The schooner stayed so long – until the late 1960s – because “we were ingrained, being Mainers, with schooners,” Smith said. Also, “we were cheap,” and sailing was cheaper than paying for fuel.

On the schooner in the winter, ice was a big worry – as on any sailing ship – and pilots and crew alike had to constantly chip away the frozen sea spray from the deck, rails, spars and rigging.

“We lived in oilskins and rubber boots and very good gloves – and very strong hands,” Dunbar said.

A new pilot back then would get “on the job training” shadowing pilots. “A few of the pilots would let you do the work right away,” though they would be right behind the trainee, ready to make any needed corrections, Dunbar said.

Nowadays, the pilots use a 65-foot steel-hulled boat with heated decks and rails, but it’s still an adventure. “We call it getting to work and sometimes it’s a son of a gun,” Dunbar said. The pilot boat even pulls directly alongside the ship.

Now, it’s usually only a dozen feet or so until a climbing pilot reaches a gangway, required on any ship with more than 30 feet of freeboard, the distance between the sea surface and the ship’s rail.

“Prior to that … you went all the way up on a rope ladder,” Smith said.

On the way up

After the climb, there is still a modern twist. Post-Sept. 11, security on ships, especially international ones coming into a petroleum harbor like Portland, is tight.

Before Dunbar even gets off the gangway, there’s a security officer asking him for ID – even though he just scaled the side of a boat in, effectively, the open ocean, and the boat he just climbed off of says “Pilot” in huge letters, as does his jacket.

The next part is the same as ever. The pilot, still out of breath from the ladder climb, creeps across the pitching deck to the superstructure and up as many as six flights of stairs “behind some 22-year-old third mate skipping every other step,” Dunbar laughed.

There, on the bridge, the pilot greets the captain, learns about the ship and tells the captain about the port.

The pilot never takes the wheel of the ship, but is given the authority to direct its course and speed. “The skipper is the skipper,” Smith said.

The pilots don’t use GPS, though they do refer to radar to “look around,” but “our training is so instinctual that we don’t even use charts. It’s all up here,” Dunbar said, pointing at his head.”

Fast freighters take under an hour to come in, while a crude-oil carrier can take two hours, including the tugs.

“You don’t have a ship a day, you have like five,” Smith said. The port handles 60 to 70 ships a month, with some trips taking three or more hours, especially if it involved waiting for the tide to turn or for a berth to open up.

“I did three jobs in three and a half hours just a little while ago,” said Dunbar.

Editorial: Close the loophole

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (July 14, 2005): Scarborough mother Denise Kring is rightly concerned that a provision in Maine’s juvenile-justice laws allows some juveniles to plead not guilty to a crime by reason of insanity without facing any compulsory medical treatment afterward.

The loophole is a major hole in Maine’s systems of justice and mental health treatment, and should be addressed immediately by state legislators. We are heartened to know that Sen. Phil Bartlett, D-Scarborough, is already at work on the matter.

Kring’s daughter Barbara, 20, was badly injured in March, in what police and prosecutors say was an assault with a knife by Barbara’s 15-year-old friend Lyndsay McLaughlin.

The nature and circumstances of the attack remain murky, even to investigators. District Attorney Stephanie Anderson has said in the past, and told the Current again this week, that some evidence appears to point to a suicide pact between the two, while other evidence contradicts that theory.

Barbara Kring and her mother have said in every one of their statements to the Current that Barbara was an innocent and unsuspecting victim, who had gone into the woods with McLaughlin intending only to become “blood sisters."

In a piece Barbara Kring wrote published in the Current in May, she wrote that she and McLaughlin were going to make small cuts on each other's hands and press them together, mixing the blood, as they had seen in the movie "The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood."

McLaughlin is accused of stabbing Barbara in the back and slashing her throat, after which she is believed to have stabbed herself in the stomach.

Were McLaughlin charged as an adult, she could be committed to a mental hospital or compelled to seek other treatment, until medical and legal authorities agreed she was healthy enough to be released.

We hope, and have no reason to doubt, that regardless of legal compulsion McLaughlin’s family will continue to provide any treatment necessary for her to deal with this incident and any related issues.

But it is not hard to imagine a situation, with another child in another family, in which the parents would not be so responsible and would only bring their child to a psychiatrist when ordered by a court to do so.

The juvenile-justice laws are intentionally different from those governing adult criminal behavior and consequences, based on the idea that young people may need additional guidance and support to correct errant ways.

This hole in Maine’s juvenile system is a difference that has the opposite effect. It removes a way that additional guidance and support can be offered, by preventing judges from imposing any conditions on young people who claim they are mentally ill and are therefore not responsible for their actions.

While we would all like to think that parents will do what is best for their children, the cold reality is that they don’t always, just as adults don’t always do what is best for themselves or each other from time to time.

That is why the law needs to allow judges, at the least, the option of compelling treatment for juveniles who plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Sea Cadets visit for firefighting class

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (July 14, 2005): Just over a dozen U.S. Navy Sea Cadets, including three from California and one from New Mexico, visited South Portland this week for training in Maine’s first firefighting and damage-control class for Sea Cadets.

The cadets, young men and women between the ages of 14 and 18, stayed at the Stewart Morrill American Legion Post on Broadway, and marched along the South Portland Greenbelt walkway to and from classes at the Coast Guard station on High Street.

Only one of the cadets was from Maine, while the others came from across the country. The class was organized by Roger Sabourin of South Portland, a retired Navy lieutenant who is commander of the Legion post and commander of the South Portland-based CG Group Portland Division of the U.S. Navy Sea Cadets.

The cadets’ week of classes, which included a trip to South Portland’s Central Fire Station for classes about fighting structure fires, earned them certification as firefighters on land and aboard ships.

The culminating drill involved a training unit owned by the Coast Guard, which places trainees in a shipboard situation where as many as eight different things can go wrong at once, Sabourin said. That teaches them to prioritize what pipes to repair first, for example.

On their first day, the cadets jumped right in, practicing using fire hydrants and carrying fire hoses in relay races. Each of them had to pass a physical fitness test before entering the class, which is just one of many the Sea Cadets program offers – including a version of the Navy SEAL special-operations classes.