PANAMA CITY, FLA.
Mark McQueen’s sand-coloured combat boots have walked the floor all through many screw ups.
Afghanistan.
Iraq.
Florida’s Panama City.
The -big name preferred had no quicker retired from the Army and began his job as town supervisor for this Gulf Coast network while it turned into slammed via a class 4 typhoon. Hurricane Michael became the most devastating storm to hit Florida in a long time. Almost all of Panama City’s water, sewer, electric powered and cellular offerings have been worn out.
Despite McQueen having no municipal experience and having been at the process simplest weeks, metropolis leaders say he’s exactly the person they want for the long restoration in advance.
“I consider the Lord despatched him,” Panama City Commissioner Billy Rader said. “God knew this turned into going to happen earlier than we did.”
The fifty eight-yr-old changed into an extraordinary desire while commissioners picked him out of a candidate pool of 80 humans, and no longer simply because his enjoy turned into from the army. When McQueen conventional the activity six months ago, he requested the commission for a grace duration to wrap up his military carrier and quit his a civilian task as a church’s business administrator. There changed into another pressing be counted, too.
“There turned into a gentleman who wished a kidney,” he says casually.
That’s proper. In the remaining four months, McQueen has retired from the military, commenced a new process, helped coordinate one of the biggest storm responses for the reason that Katrina, and donated a kidney.
To a stranger.
In August, he donated his left kidney to a man at his church and took a few weeks to get better (the recipient is doing properly).
McQueen got here to Panama City in 1988 for a job at a neighbourhood network college. He met his wife here, and they raised their two youngsters right here. Over the years, he rose inside the ranks of the navy, from officer to Special Operations Command, to his final task as commanding fashionable of the 108th Training Command founded in Charlotte, North Carolina. There, he commanded some 7,000 squaddies. One in their duties was to repair Baghdad’s infrastructure.
Another, the greater latest project changed into to assist orchestrate the emergency response to Hurricane Florence on Sept. 14. He overlooked a recent metropolis commission meeting due to that.
On Sept. 24, he marked his first day on the task and mentioned to the nearby paper what he wanted to accomplish in his first one hundred twenty days.
He spoke of looking “down and in” and “up and out” to set the framework for a long-time period strategic plan. He referred to five-year dreams and an extended-time period imaginative and prescient that stretched closer to 2050.
All that lasted about two weeks.
When Hurricane Michael bore down on Florida’s Panhandle, he ordered an evacuation for parts of the city and unrolled his Army bed mat and camouflage blanket within the nook of the police leader’s office. As the eyewall of the monster storm exceeded over the town, the police station’s roof threatened to boost. Water trickled into the building.
When the typhoon exceeded, he surveyed the harm on this town of forty,000 humans. Ninety per cent of all of the strength poles had been down. One of the two wastewater treatment plants was inoperable. Cellphones were not operating. The metropolis’s lush tree canopy become in splinters, covering roads and houses.
“This is Baghdad with trees,” he stated. “One hundred percentage disintegrate of infrastructure.”
His very own home wasn’t damaged — “only some roof tiles” — which allowed him to pour all of his attention into the metropolis.
Now, more than two weeks for the reason that typhoon, he is nonetheless sleeping in the leader’s workplace, however, took a day to fly to Washington, D.C.
His retirement ceremony from the military became Friday. It was his first day of seeing that earlier than the storm.
After, he plans to go back to Panama City and pull on his combat boots for the long haul. He knows he has his work cut out for him. Tens of lots of homes are unlivable, and in a city in which seventy-five percent of the schoolchildren get unfastened or reduced rate lunch, it will be a project to discover low priced housing — or any housing at all — for the needy.
Said McQueen: “I’m going to rebuild the economic engine of the town. We’re going to paintings the hassle, and create a solution.”
