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Operation BBQ Relief Serves 125,000 Meals After Hurricane Irma

Rachel Iacovone
/
WGCU
An Operation BBQ Relief volunteer loads the cooked pork into a machine for further sorting before distribution begins outside Germain Arena in Estero.

Food aid has come in many forms after Hurricane Irma, but one group brought the comfort of All-American barbecue to Southwest Florida after the storm — the unique operation called Operation BBQ Relief in Estero.

Standing in the dry parking lot in front of Germain Arena, you’d almost forget it was filled with water a week before — trapping those with unraised cars at the arena’s shelter until the remnants of Hurricane Irma finally receded.

Now, the lot is filled with trailers, tents and semi-trucks and, even more prominently, the overwhelming smell of smoky barbecue.

Credit Rachel Iacovone / WGCU
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WGCU
One of several dozen coolers full of barbecued pork to be processed by volunteers before distribution

"This is my second one in less than a month because I was down for Hurricane Harvey in Houston," Tim Lambert said. "We did 400,000 meals nearly — 371,760 to be exact."

Lambert is a volunteer for Operation BBQ Relief. It’s a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve up barbecue to people hit by disaster — providing nourishment and comfort in the form of trays upon trays of smoky pulled pork and slow grilled vegetables.

Operation BBQ Relief is headquartered in Pleasant Hill, Missouri — just outside of Kansas City. But, the people who carry out its mission are from the competitive barbecue circuit, drawing pit masters from across the country.

Every day, they wake up far from home — either in beds in donated trailers or in the reclined seats of their own cars — to begin cooking the vegetables at 4 a.m. and processing the meat by 5 a.m. Then, distribution begins as banquet trays are loaded into trucks, which then head to the hardest hit areas, like Everglades City.

"They’re the forgotten, and that’s who we have to take care of," Lambert said. "And, we’re going to have to continue to take care of them, even after all this major relief effort is gone because those are the folks that had very little to begin with. Now, they have even less."

Lambert is from Oregon, but he has family in Port Charlotte. So, he stays with them and makes the commute down to Germain each morning, beginning at 3 a.m.

His meat-sorting partner for the day is Cheri Boyer. Her Fort Myers Beach home was destroyed in Hurricane Charley.

Credit Rachel Iacovone / WGCU
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WGCU
Fort Myers Beach resident Cheri Boyer sorts through the cooked pork.

"This time, I mean, the beach was really spared," Boyer said, "so I mean, right away, I was just trying to find anybody."

Anybody in need, Boyer says. She wipes her sweating face with her sleeve.

The meat they are sorting through will be packaged in large aluminum trays alongside the vegetables. They are then distributed to community groups, religious organizations and county governments. Many come to pick up by car and truck, but a partnership with FedEx allows the fruits of Operation BBQ Relief's labor to reach as far as the Florida Keys with the help of planes.

By the end of the group’s four-day tenure, 125,000 meals were distributed. Boyer says not to focus on that number though.

"You know, it’s not that number," she said.  "It’s the one meal that counts."

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
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