PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : General Fuses Comic Relief, Disaster Relief

The good-natured general is once again cracking jokes, relieving the tension in a place that is in dire need of relief.

It’s Labor Day weekend, well after Hurricane Andrew practically wiped this South Florida city off the map. Maj. Gen. Steven Arnold is worried about coordinating the efforts of thousands of volunteers expected to flock to the area. The mayor, meanwhile, wants to go for a ride in a military helicopter to check the wreckage from above. But there is a problem: He needs to be back on the ground 45 minutes after flight time.

“No problem,” Arnold replies dryly. “The only thing is, to get you out we have a bungee cord and you have to drop out from 200 feet.”

The humor is par for the course for this 30-year military man, who for more than two weeks now has been the calm eye in a furious storm of activity--the effort to bring disaster relief to hurricane victims in South Florida’s two most ravaged communities, Homestead and Florida City.

With a master’s degree in systems management from USC, the 52-year-old Arnold brings a businesslike approach to solving problems that has earned him high praise from local authorities, who also appreciate his wit.

“There’s no doubt that he’s a military man because he carries himself that way,” says Tom David, a Dade County official who has been assisting in the Homestead relief effort. “But he smiles a lot, laughs a lot. If you took the uniform off him, he’d be a good CEO of a company.”

With the military in charge of cleaning up the horrendous mess left by the hurricane as well as supplying food, water, shelter and medical care to residents here for the foreseeable future, Arnold has much to do.

His job is a constant juggling act; the most difficult task, he says, is coordinating the myriad of local, state, federal and volunteer agencies involved in hurricane relief. But he resists any notion that he is in charge of the relief effort--despite the clear appearance that he is running the show.

“I’m not running it,” he insists. “I’m here to help. . . . We don’t want to create a dependency. We want to create a revived independency of local governments.”

Arnold, who commands the Army’s 10th Mountain Division out of Ft. Drum, N.Y., is not in charge of the entire military relief effort in South Florida. He reports to the commander of the 18th Airborne Division, who in turn reports to Gen. Sam Ebeson, who represents the military on the joint task force that is coordinating the relief effort.

Yet with more than 10,000 of the 24,000 soldiers stationed here under his direct and indirect command, Arnold, a Gulf War veteran, is the in-the-trenches supervisor of the relief effort in Andrew’s path of greatest destruction. He is both a big-picture man and a detail man, Homestead City Manager Alex Muxo says, and it is evident that little escapes Arnold’s attention.

“Ice!” he shouts, as a lower-ranking commander passes him in the hallway of Homestead City Hall, where Arnold has commandeered the city attorney’s office as his temporary headquarters. “We need ice.”

“Sir,” the officer replies, “we worked ice all night. We got a contractor out of Texas and it’s coming in . . . .”

Before he can finish, the general cuts him off. “Out of Texas?” he asks with a wry smile. “Then it’s called water.”