When disaster strikes, Operation Blessing swoops in

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

The Operation Blessing truck groaned up a steep hill into a shanty town. Haitians carrying plastic buckets hurried out of tarp and tin shacks and surrounded the dusty truck as it hissed to a stop.

Bill Horan was watching the delivery on this late September day. He rattled off the truck’s superior qualities.

“It’s got three axles, not two!” he yelled over the growling diesel engine. “It carries 4,000 gallons of water, not 3,000! It takes a real truck driver to drive it!”

Horan wore his standard uniform: a perfectly pressed yellow safari shirt embroidered with “Operation Blessing,” khakis and lightweight hiking boots. A BlackBerry and a cellphone hung from his belt.

Christian broadcaster and businessman Pat Robertson, Operation Blessing’s founder, hired Horan in 2002 to run Operation Blessing, the Virginia Beach-based humanitarian group. Founded in 1978 to help needy people, the group originally distributed food and clothing and was known locally for its annual holiday dinner for the poor.

Under Horan, the nonprofit organization has become a major player in international disaster relief. Its staff set up in Haiti days after the devastating earthquake in January 2010.

As a man who made his fortune selling used heavy machinery around the world – “moving big ugly stuff around and dealing with foreigners,” he says – Horan delights in the logistical nuts and bolts of international humanitarian work.

After the water delivery, he watched Haitian workers assemble wheelchairs in Operation Blessing’s warehouse in Port-au-Prince. The organization has teamed up with a California nonprofit to distribute free wheelchairs made from lawn chairs, and a new style had arrived. Horan gave one a spin across the warehouse floor. He was pleased that unlike the last model, it could be adjusted to fit a person’s size. He liked how easy it is to ship them.

“The best thing is you can do 500 in a container!” he said.

The president of Operation Blessing is on a mission. It’s just not the kind you might expect.

Horan rode shotgun in a gold Lexus SUV as it bounced along a rutted road in Port-au-Prince. The vehicle forded a stream gushing across the road. The water was a sickly gray.

“Oh, man,” Horan said. “The cholera bell will be ringing today.”

The driver stopped outside St. Damien Hospital, a children’s facility, and tapped the horn. Armed guards swung open a metal gate.

After the earthquake, cholera, absent in Haiti for decades, had struck. The strain was traced to United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal who had camped upstream of Port-au-Prince.

Operation Blessing helped quickly build a cholera ward at nearby St. Luke Hospital with a $100,000 contribution.

The Rev. Rick Frechette, who founded the hospitals, appeared in a flowing white robe, running shoes peeking out the bottom. He was preparing to celebrate Mass for the dead in a small stone chapel next to the hospital. Two body bags lay on the concrete floor.

“The cholera is way up again,” Frechette said. “The place is filling up, my God.”

Horan bowed his head solemnly for the Mass.

Afterward, he surveyed the cholera ward at St. Luke, a simple structure of plywood walls, concrete floors and a tin roof. Patients lay with their backsides hanging through holes in cots, below which were buckets. Bags of intravenous fluids hung from chains on the ceiling.

Cholera, which quickly drains its victims’ bodily fluids through uncontrollable diarrhea, is largely spread by contaminated feces, a problem in a country without central sewage systems. The cure is immediate rehydration, but in Haiti, clean water is often unavailable or too expensive.

Horan has attacked the problem. Operation Blessing imported a donated chlorine generator that produces bleach to disinfect water. Workers at the cholera ward use Operation Blessing’s bleach for the never-ending task of swabbing floors to prevent the disease from spreading.

Horan enjoys the immense challenges in Haiti, a country only a 90-minute flight from Miami and a half-day of travel from his North End Virginia Beach home. He described Haiti as a “laboratory of suffering.” He had been back 17 times since the quake hit. Its basic needs still astonish him.

“It’s hard to believe a country in our hemisphere could be so messed up.”

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Horan tapped at his iPad, a cup of coffee at his elbow. He was up early sitting alone at the large dining room table in Operation Blessing’s Port-au-Prince compound. Horan had bought the former guesthouse after the earthquake and expanded it to 11 bedrooms. Outside, two guards with 12-gauge shotguns stood watch near the compound’s razor-wire-topped walls.

The business day was about to close in India, where Operation Blessing has a large presence. Horan fired off emails before explaining the group’s staggering growth under his leadership.

Horan is blunt and energetic, a man who enjoys getting difficult things done. He is 67, and he brought to the humanitarian group decades of business experience from building a used mining equipment company.

He’s grown Operation Blessing into the country’s sixth-biggest international charity. Annual revenue has soared from $65 million in 2003 to $473 million today, with minimal overhead. About 99 percent of its revenue goes toward services, earning the charity high marks from groups that monitor nonprofits.

Operation Blessing’s emphasis now includes major disaster relief: responding to tsunamis and earthquakes in Asia, drought and famine in Africa and Latin America, and hurricanes and tornadoes in the United States.

While Horan oversees 576 full-time employees in 24 countries, his biggest focus now is in Haiti. Operation Blessing’s 20 staffers there work on providing clean water, building medical facilities, bringing in specialized equipment, caring for disabled children and farming fish. Horan calculates that he’s sent 59 shipments of medicine, food, water and supplies worth $192 million to Haiti.

Much of the new revenue is due to a massive increase in noncash donations from corporations.

Earlier this year, Operation Blessing’s warehouse in Chesapeake, the biggest of three in the United States, was packed with pallets of shampoo, crackers, diapers, Snapple, canned green beans, rice and medicine. Horan has aggressively solicited medical contributions, a strategy that has greatly influenced the bottom line.

About $337 million – 70 percent of Operation Blessing’s revenue last year – came from donated medicine and medical supplies, the most recent tax return shows. Food, clothing and household goods accounted for another $111 million. Operation Blessing often persuades people to donate and then distributes what it receives.

“We’re a kind of pipeline – and I didn’t get this from Pat – a conduit between those who want to give and those who are in need,” Horan said.

The organization’s 18 semi-trucks and 62 refrigerated trailers are placed strategically around the United States. If a company wants to donate, say, navy beans or Depends, Operation Blessing is ready.

“You call, we haul,” Horan said.

The organization uses a similar technique for managing volunteers in disaster zones.

When a tornado struck Deltaville, Va., in April, nine Operation Blessing staffers traveled there with a mobile kitchen, an 18-ton crane, a front-end loader, a Bobcat, a trailer full of tools and their “Mobile Command Center,” a tricked-out RV with advanced communications.

About 50 volunteers showed up. They were outfitted in Operation Blessing T-shirts and given tools and instructions on where to work based on a prioritization system.

“They’re the most well-organized organization I’ve ever worked with,” said Gladys Prince, who was helping clear trees from a neighbor’s yard the day after Operation Blessing volunteers assisted with damage to her home.

“I hope they’re blessed with donations from this,” said Prince’s daughter, Cheryl Prince-Teagle. “They certainly should be.”

Images of volunteers wielding chain saws and rakes were soon featured on Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and his show, “The 700 Club,” with solicitations for donations. Operation Blessing’s offices are on the CBN campus in Virginia Beach.

Lately, Operation Blessing’s domestic work has included quickly rebuilding a home or business and surprising the owners in a “reveal” moment modeled after the popular TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

The approach, used at an ice cream shop on Hatteras Island damaged by Hurricane Irene in August, sometimes leads to glowing news stories pitched by the group’s New York City public relations firm. For the Outer Banks “reveal,” Operation Blessing chartered a boat to the island – the road was washed out – and invited the news media along.

It was a chance meeting that brought Horan out of semi-retirement.

In 2002, Pat Robertson and his wife took a five-day vacation to the Cayman Islands. They traveled with an old friend, William Dooner, and his wife. Robertson wanted to fish, and Dooner, a former island resident, knew just the man to take them: Bill Horan.

Horan, then president of the Cayman Islands Angling Club, is a serious angler known in fishing circles as “Wahoo Willie,” after the game fish. On the outing, Horan’s 29-foot boat lost power in heavy seas and Robertson got sick while they heaved at anchor waiting for a tow. The two began what Horan described as a “five-day conversation.”

“Pat and I hit it off,” he said. “We just clicked.”

Horan said that when he dropped Robertson off at the airport, Robertson told him: “God’s got a plan for you. You just don’t know it yet.”

Three weeks later, Robertson called Horan and invited him to Virginia Beach. Over dinner at The Founders Inn on the Regent University campus, Robertson told Horan he wanted him to be president of Operation Blessing. Horan accepted. Today, his annual salary is about $346,000.

“I just can’t explain it,” he said of the series of events. “It was just so bizarre.”

Horan got his start in business when he took over his late grandfather’s gravel pit in Michigan after dropping out of college. He parlayed his knowledge of heavy machinery into a career buying, selling and transporting used mining equipment – rock crushers, cranes, conveyor belts – in 33 countries. Along the way, he got divorced, quit drinking, remarried and had two daughters, now grown.

“He is very creative and when you give him a challenge, he jumps on it like a Marine taking a hill,” Robertson said in a statement. “From running his company, Bill also understands big machinery and construction. He’s been involved in all sorts of things that are similar to what Operation Blessing does.”

When Horan took over Operation Blessing in 2002, he inherited a nonprofit tainted by bad publicity.

Two former Operation Blessing pilots said in 1997 that most of their work a few years earlier involved flying equipment to Robertson’s failed diamond mining venture in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Robertson paid back Operation Blessing for use of the planes. Robertson is no longer involved in mining, a spokesman said.

Operation Blessing’s highly publicized conversion of a jumbo jet to a flying hospital for medical missions also was a financial and public relations disaster.

Under Horan’s leadership, Operation Blessing has become more of a facilitator. For example, it no longer has its own medical team, but it helps doctors get to needy patients. A surgical team from Virginia Beach stayed at Operation Blessing’s compound in Haiti recently, performing hernia surgeries at a local hospital.

The group’s move toward disaster relief began after Hurricane Isabel in 2003, when Operation Blessing staffers helped the Salvation Army serve meals. A CBN producer filed a story and viewers noticed.

“Donors seemed to like our quick reaction,” Horan said. “A disaster has a sense of urgency most causes don’t.”

More disaster relief efforts followed: the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina. Operation Blessing bought a house in New Orleans and spent two years managing volunteers, serving food and battling mosquitoes and rats. Donors gave $20 million, Horan said.

Operation Blessing had staff on the ground in Haiti the day after the January 2010 quake. Shortly after, Robertson interviewed Horan live on “The 700 Club.”

Robertson asked Horan to describe the situation. Horan called the quake a “calamity of cataclysmic proportions.” Robertson then suggested it might be a “blessing in disguise” because it would give Haitians the opportunity to rebuild substandard structures. Horan paused for a beat before saying: “Well, I don’t know. I would think that would be a pretty optimistic attitude.”

What came next made headlines. Robertson connected the earthquake to a deal he said Haitians made with the devil when they revolted against French colonialists in 1791.

“They got together and swore a pact to the devil,” Robertson told viewers. “They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ It’s a true story. So the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’ ”

The widely denounced remark illustrated Robertson’s sometimes paradoxical relationship with Operation Blessing. He is its founder, and CBN has given Operation Blessing millions, including $15 million last year – more than all other cash donations combined. Yet his pronouncements can make it difficult to form partnerships and attract donors.

“It was very unfortunate,” Horan said of the comment. “A lot of people took exception to it, and it made our task a little more difficult, and I’ll leave it at that. There are things he says that I wish he wouldn’t, but I’m not going to trash the guy. We hope to reach a tipping point where people say, ‘You know, we really don’t care what Pat says. We like what he’s doing.’ ”

Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard doctor who runs the largest nongovernmental organization in Haiti, Partners in Health, wrote in his latest book that he disagreed with Robertson’s Haiti remark but called Operation Blessing “one of the very first, and best led,” organizations he worked with in the year after the earthquake.

U.S. donors have given Operation Blessing $6.7 million in cash for Haiti, and the group has forged relationships there with organizations to which they don’t appear to be ideologically aligned.

“Disaster makes strange bedfellows,” said Bryn Mooser, Haiti director for Artists for Peace and Justice, a nonprofit that’s worked with Operation Blessing. “We’re a Hollywood organization and they’re a Pat Robertson organization, but on the ground, none of those things matter. It’s all about how we can build a better Haiti.”

In Haiti, the focus of Operation Blessing’s staff appears to be clean water, health and nutrition.

Horan said proselytizing is not part of their mission. A former Roman Catholic, Horan described himself as a “nondenominational Protestant.”

“Certainly we are unabashedly Christian – we’d never run from that – but in humanitarian work it’s my belief that it’s more important to do what good Christians are supposed to do instead of talking about it.”

Horan’s to-do list in Haiti is long enough that he can’t see himself stepping down soon.

“I feel like everything I’ve ever done in my life was practice for what I’m doing now,” he said.

He sees improvements at the home for disabled Haitian children Operation Blessing helps run. He wants to get more doctors to the country for clinical work and for training its medical personnel. Then there’s an ambitious fish-farming project he hopes will jump-start an industry while providing a much-needed source of protein. And always, more clean-water projects.

Drilling deep wells in Haiti proved to be a problem, and Horan, ever the equipment guy, thought big.

He recently bought a used 12-ton well-drilling rig for $90,000. Operation Blessing workers transported it from Virginia Beach to Miami on a trailer and put it on a ship bound for Haiti.

He envisions drilling wells at churches, orphanages and villages. Maybe one a week, and on to the next site, and the next.

Aaron Applegate, (757) 222-5122, aaron.applegate@pilotonline.com