2 Billionaires, Major Firms Helping Charleston

Two of America’s richest people--along with some of the nation’s biggest corporations--pitched in to help the relief effort in Charleston, S.C., in the wake of Hurricane Hugo, local officials said Monday.

Grateful local leaders said the private sector aid has been crucial in a battered city that remains without power long after Hugo’s passing.

Sam Walton, chairman of Arkansas-based Wal-Mart Stores and widely considered to be the richest man in America, and Alfred Taubman, a Detroit-area billionaire shopping-center and real-estate magnate and owner of Southeby’s auction house, provided critical aid to the storm-ravaged areas of South Carolina, civic leaders said.

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., praising Taubman and Walton, called their efforts “incredible.”

Walton’s Wal-Mart chain of discount stores is providing badly needed household goods, and Taubman’s staff is now coordinating the flow of donated goods and services pouring in to relieve the city.

Other major corporations also are helping out. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, working with its Huntsville, Ala., bottler, which also bottles water, has been providing clean drinking water and tanker trucks to deliver it. So far, 12,000 gallons have been sent on tractor-trailers to Charleston, and an additional 6,000 gallons will be shipped today, a spokesman for Coca-Cola said Monday.

St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s largest brewer, also is shipping water into the area, a spokesman said.

Winn-Dixie, one of the largest grocery chains in the Southeast, is donating food and other grocery items for Charleston residents.

Meanwhile, General Dynamics Corp., a big St. Louis-based defense contractor that makes submarine hull components near Charleston, has donated the time of 50 workers to help clean up the city while its Charleston-area factory remains shut by heavy hurricane damage.

Smaller companies, in the Southeast and around the nation, are sending other necessities, ranging from heavy machinery and construction equipment for clearing debris to large-scale ovens and cooking equipment for feeding the homeless.

Tied to Ownership of Complex

Taubman’s involvement resulted from his ownership of Charleston Place, a hotel and retail complex in downtown Charleston. Before Hugo hit, Taubman dispatched an appropriately named executive, Joyce Storm, from his Detroit-area headquarters to Charleston to oversee emergency preparations at Charleston Place.

As Hugo swept over Charleston, 108 people took shelter in the ballroom of the Omni Hotel at Charleston Place, said Christopher Tennyson, a spokesman for Taubman.

After the hurricane had left the complex relatively undamaged, Storm took over, on behalf of Mayor Riley, the job of organizing and coordinating the donated goods and services pouring into the city from all over the nation.

Until she established a central processing and dispatching point in a downtown auditorium for the truckloads of goods rolling in, the relief effort had lacked organization. She established a system to deliver the goods to the isolated disaster areas that needed it most.

“She’s become a local hero,” Cynthia Andrews, wife of Dean Andrews, the general manager of the Omni Hotel, said Monday.

Andrews and Storm persuaded other major corporations to get involved; it was Andrews who got Walton’s help.

Workers from the 40-hotel Omni chain who were rushed into Charleston to help the local Omni clean up after the hurricane were standing in puddles on the first floor of City Hall on Monday manning a phone bank to accept donations of money, labor and supplies. The workers ranged from doormen to reservation clerks to sales managers.

“I just feel so good about helping people,” said Laura Cowan, a sales manager for the Omni Hotel in Cincinnati, as she answered phone calls at City Hall. “It’s something I’ll never get to do on this scale again.”

Staff writer Larry Green contributed to this story from Charleston.