TORONTO — After listening to news reports about all the death and despair gripping Hurricane Katrina victims on the Gulf Coast, Bowmanville, Ont. driver Peter Bruno decided to head south to get aid to the stricken region.

It turns out his boss, Don Frankland of Whitby’s Frankland Cartage, was one of the many Canadian carriers thinking the same thing. “Pete called me and asks me if I want to help out,” said Frankland.

“He said he would be interested in giving his time for the trip and I said I’d donate the truck and trailer and it snowballed from there.”

Frankland parked a couple of trailers in area malls and kind-hearted citizens did the rest– quickly filling those trailers with water, personal hygiene products, sleeping bags, clothing, and baby supplies.

“It was an amazing response,” said Frankland. “We had one young girl of 17 who had $4,000 she had saved for back-to-school shopping who wanted to give it all to us, but we convinced her $500 would be fine. Other companies kicked in money for fuel vouchers.”

Frankland Cartage consolidated the goods into one trailer and Bruno took it from there with a Pete 387.

Bruno left Bowmanville on a Sunday night and managed to breeze through customs in under an hour after staff realized the precious nature of the goods he was carrying.

“They ask for my paperwork. I tell them, ‘I don’t have any,’ and then explained what I was carrying and where I was headed,” he said.
“Once they knew what I was doing, they bent over backwards to get me out of there.”

Upon arrival in Long Beach, Miss., not far from Gulfport, Bruno said the scene on the ground was incredible. “It was devastation. Total devastation. It was like being in a war zone,” he explains. “Between the military helicopters flying overhead and the National Guard vehicles going down the road, trees uprooted, houses with no roofs, no walls — just indescribable. It was an absolute mess. These people need help — faster than they’re getting it unfortunately.”

But the folks at Coast Episcopal School in Long Beach, an aid-distribution point where Bruno dropped his load, were very thankful for the supplies they received from their new friends in Canada.