A CONTIGENT of Bermuda Regiment soldiers and volunteer Parks Department staff arrived back in Bermuda this week after 13 days of assisting the people of Turks & Caicos Islands recover from Hurricane Ike, a category four storm. Dave Tingley, the senior superintendent of the Parks Department, who has been in the landscape contracting and maintenance industry for more than 30 years headed to Grand Turk, the islands' capital, to lend a helping hand. He spoke with Mid-Ocean News reporter Lindsay Kelly and photographer Tamell Simmons about the extensive damage he saw, his memorable moments and what the experience meant to him.

Q: What is your role at the Parks Department?

A: I supervise all the maintenance and landscaping crews throughout the island. Making sure everyone has what they need, making adjustments where we need to, following up and making sure the quality is where we need it to be at schools, government buildings, post offices, roads, bridges, etc.

Q: Why did you decide to volunteer to go the Turks & Caicos?

A: They needed help. Pretty simple. I was talking to the Director, Department of Parks Lisa-Dawn Johnston who had spoken with a colleague of hers in Turks & Caicos who described how dire the situation was and said we should send some people down. The Regiment was already going down so we contacted the Regiment and offered our services. They coordinated everything. All in all, there were nine of us from the Parks Department who volunteered.

Q: Have you been to Turks & Caicos before?

A: Never.

Q: What did you expect to see when you went down there?

A: My expectation was close to the reality. There was a lot of damage and a lot of destruction. It was interesting because we flew down on Coast Guard C-130s that have very few windows so our first glimpse of Grand Turk was walking off the plane, which was different from a normal flight where you can see the area when you fly in. So when we got off the plane, the damage was right in front of us. The airport was open but barely. There was tin everywhere, trees had blown down and there were damaged vehicles. When we left there was still a taxi cab that had been blown onto its side outside the airport.

Q: Were you surprised at what you saw?

A: I was surprised at Grand Turk in general. It was very flat, very stark, not a lot of trees but had a lot of shrub-type vegetation. After a hurricane, it turned all the leaves brown and everything was full of trash. It made for a surprising picture. When we got there it had been about seven or eight days since the hurricane hit and I was surprised to see that there were still power lines down, telephone poles lying out in the middle of the road, a lot of things that still needed to be taken care of.

I think the other thing that was surprising to all of us was that there is a large Haitian population in Grand Turk and a lot of them are there illegally so they're living in shacks that they have made from whatever they can find. There are some structures where if you looked T them closely, were built on top of pallets (flat transport structure that supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift) for the floor. So those structures were really damaged. There are a couple hundred of those types of homes at least and that's probably a low guess. Last Thursday the authorities went through and marked a big, red "x" on every house that was to be demolished. And, there were a lot "x"s. When they started pushing the houses in, it was pretty sad.

Q: Where did the displaced people go?

A: The International Rotary Club sent down tents, I think they called it Habitat in a Box, which includes a tent and camp stove that came all in one unit. The Red Cross was passing those out and setting them up for people.

Q: Did the scene affect you in any way?

A: You kind of go through different stages with an event like this. Your adrenaline is pumping when you are working and helping out but then the reality hits. One of the things that affected me the most was when I went to the church of Maria Williams, the Permanent Secretary of Engineering Management Services, the equivalent of Bermuda's Works & Engineering, and her husband. I took some pictures of the roof that was badly damaged and then walked around back to one of the doors leading into the sanctuary, which was blown out. I walked in and was not prepared for what I saw. It was a beautiful sanctuary that looked like it had been recently renovated but the whole ceiling was torn out and it was just trashed. It was just incredible. That really hit me hard.

Q. What was the biggest challenge you faced while you were down there?

A: We faced some coordination challenges. We were pretty much on our own. We had nine guys, a truck and eight chainsaws that we brought down so we went out in the truck driving through the entire island and picked areas that we thought we could the most good in. Another challenge was that we wanted to take a chipper down with us but there wasn't room on the plane so all we could do was pile the debris on the side of the road to be collected.

Q: What was an average day like?

A: We would go out about 7:30 a.m. and head to the areas we identified and remove trees and cut away brush. We did a little bit of everything; we moved telephone poles, power lines, cleared roadways and beaches - doing whatever we could do. We worked for about eight hours every day. The island is pretty small so we pretty much covered the entire island. We offered to go over to South Caicos to help out there but they just weren't ready for us to come. They had no place to stay or a vehicle for us to use so it didn't work out.

We also worked at the Arboretum that was just a mess. We trimmed everything up, propped the trees back up and covered the roots to try and save them.

Q: Where did you stay?

A: We stayed in tents on cots. We nicknamed our campsite Camp HeeHaw because they had lots of feral donkeys down there. These donkeys would just wander around all day and all night and they would wake us up a couple times a night by making this ungodly sound. But it was fun; it had a certain amount of charm to it.

The Regiment set up camp for us and provided the food. It was great working with them. I worked directly with Major Jones and he was awesome.

Q: The Regiment did different things from your staff?

A: The Regiment repaired roofs and put a temporary repair on the fence at the port to secure it. They worked at schools, government buildings, doing a lot of roof top repairs. They tarped the water tanks at the reverse osmosis plants to try and keep the critters out.

Q: Did you speak with any of the locals? How hopeful were they about getting things back to normal?

A: They are pretty resilient. It was pretty neat, people would come up to you that you have never seen before and thank you for being there.

Q: How long do you think that it will take until things are back to normal?

A: I talked to the curator at the National Museum, who lived out towards where our camp was and he said that the authorities told him that it would be Christmas by the time they got power back.

Q: The entire island doesn't have power?

A: No. Nothing. Absolutely no power - everything was operating on generators. It was really weird driving at night, it would be totally dark and you couldn't see anything. We had to be careful because then you would have an occasional donkey walking out in front of you. The downtown area was supposed to come back online Sunday but I'm not sure if it did.

Q: Does seeing all the damage make you think about how well prepared Bermuda is for a hurricane?

A: I feel pretty good about how well prepared we are. One of the differences that some people who were down there with me said the difference is that our homes are solidly made and when people go to work to clean up after a hurricane, at least they can go knowing their families are taken care of in the house. Down there, people go to work knowing their house is badly damaged and your family is either living in it or is displaced. So that was one of the problems they had down there, getting anyone to come to work because people were taking care of their houses. It's that added stress that we wouldn't have here.

Q: Was there one particular experience that you'll remember?

A: One of the things I wasn't prepared for was all of the feral donkeys that are walking around. And there are also horses. One day we cleared about a mile of Grand Turks main tourist beach that was all covered with broken Casuarina trees so we pruned them all and cleared the brush. About a mile up the beach was an abandoned house and we found this horse lying on the ground with its backbone and ribs sticking out.

We thought he was dead but as we got closer he got up and staggered around a bit and fell back down two or three times. He looked like he was dying.

We left him but as I was eating my lunch I thought to myself that I couldn't let this happen so I found a bucket and filled it with water and walked back to the house and gave him water. I found a water tank in the abandoned house so I kept feeding him water. When I left Grand Turk, I saw him wandering around out by the airport so it looks like he was ok. Before the hurricane, they had six months of drought so the horse was in bad shape to begin with.

Q: Would you volunteer again, if needed?

A: In a heartbeat. I told my wife that even though I've done mission projects before, I would like to become a first responder. Doing something like this as a first responder is a lot more gratifying to me. It was a great experience.