When Hurricane Irma started moving toward the East Coast of Florida, a shipment of several containers filled with rowing shells and equipment bound for Nathan Benderson Park, was diverted away from Miami, the Florida point of arrival, to Houston, Texas.
Once in Houston, the containers fell into a sort of bureaucratic maze that was slowing their arrival to the coaches and athletes who needed them to compete at the 2017 World Rowing Championships.
When the regatta organizers learned of the problem, they contacted USRowing chief executive officer, Patrick McNerney, who was in Colorado Springs meeting with the United States Olympic Committee.
"The head of the USOC logistics got involved in helping navigate some of the bureaucracy in the Port of Houston," McNerney said. Then he reached out to Joe Flynn, a new member of the USRowing Board of Directors and a junior coach at the Rowing Club of the Woodlands, located about 35 miles outside of Houston.
And that set in motion the kind of story the rowing community is familiar with - when rowers need help, other rowers come to their aid. "There are certain characteristics of the rowing community and Joe Flynn's club is a good representation of that," McNerney said.
"Sunday night, I get this call from Patrick, who says, 'Joe, there are a bunch of containers that were diverted because of the storm and we don't exactly know where they are.' I told Patrick I'm am in Houston and probably pretty close to where they are," Flynn said.
Flynn said that he then called on members of his club who worked in the Port of Houston and some who were pilots and familiar with how customs works. "We made a few phone calls, and one guy that was most helpful a pilot who knows his way around in this kind of an emergency."
One by one the various containers were located and were rerouted to Sarasota; that is, all but one, Flynn said.
"The one that got hung up had equipment for Norway and Ireland and several other teams and it was in Houston, but we didn't really know what the status was."
In the meantime, McNerney also learned that Norwegian coach Johan Lindberg was flying to Houston. McNerney told Flynn, who contacted Lindberg and offered to host him.
Flynn said that the pilot eventually learned that the stalled container was sitting in customs waiting for inspection. "Once we learned where it was, we figured out the fastest way to get it to Sarasota was to unpack it and put it on a trailer and they drive it to Sarasota."
Flynn said he marshalled a group of about 25 club members, included several juniors who had recently volunteered to help victims of the Hurricane Hugo which had recently devastated much of the Houston area with flooding rain.
"They understood what it meant when people needed help," Flynn said. "These kids had been through one hurricane and they knew that this was really important."
While waiting for the container to be release and driven to The Woodlands, Lindberg, an internationally renowned coach, took advantage of the time to go out on the water with Flynn's juniors.
The container got to the boathouse, the equipment got to Sarasota quicker than it would have if it had gone through customs and been put on a commercial trailer, and Flynn's kids got to be on the water with Lindberg.
"The local club was fantastic," Lindberg said Saturday morning on the race venue in Sarasota. "The youngest in the club, about 20, helped us unload and reload. We had a chance to train two more session here in Sarasota than if we had waited to have the container put on a trailer truck.
"It was impressive. And I got to be on the water with the kids," Lindberg said. "It was fun to be with a club again. If you are with a national team, everything is quite easy. It was good to be with a club again to see how it all works."
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