Tragedy unites family of seriously injured worker

A family that had been estranged from a man hurt in the blast goes to him in the hospital.

By AMY HERDY

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 10, 1999

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TAMPA -- Arnita Hannah's heart ached for the bandaged, swollen man in the intensive care unit who appeared to be all alone.

"I couldn't imagine someone being hurt with no family there at all for him," Hannah remembered thinking as she visited Tampa General Hospital on Thursday to be with the family of Edward Barker, who died later that afternoon from his injuries.

What she later learned came as a shock: The unknown man, critically injured in the Tampa Electric explosion, was no stranger. He was her nephew, 32-year-old Leandris Drew.

TECO and hospital officials, too, had difficulty identifying Drew. That was because he was a day laborer who had walked into a downtown Tampa labor pool Thursday and ended up being sent to the power plant to do manual work for $5.87 an hour.

It was several hours after the explosion before any members of his family were notified, said Connie Drew, his stepmother, in the hospital waiting room Friday.

Her stepson, who had been estranged from the family for the past month, evidently had recently begun working day labor jobs, Drew said, and it was another day labor employee who finally identified him in the hospital.

His family had no idea he was working at TECO's Gannon plant the morning of the explosion.

Drew said she was getting ready to leave home Thursday afternoon to visit the Barkers, who are close friends of the family, when she returned a call from a message on her answering machine.

A person at Team Day Labor, a labor pool in downtown Tampa, asked her if she was a relative of Leandris Drew, and when she said yes, his message was brief.

"He said, "He was in the Gannon explosion, he's at Tampa General and we don't expect him to make it,' " recalled Drew, who works as an editorial assistant in the Carrollwood office of the Times.

She felt her knees go weak.

The family -- Drew, her husband, Leon, who is Leandris' father, and their daughter, LeAndra Drew -- all immediately headed to the hospital. Seeing the man they lovingly refer to as Ron was a shock, Drew said. Although he was not burned, Leandris Drew was badly injured.

"His head is shaved, he has stitches all around, and he is swollen," she said Friday. "His arm is in a sling, he has on a neck brace, and he's on a ventilator."

A phrase on her stepson's chart spells out all that she knows for now about what happened to him. It reads: "Excavated from rubble."

The family has no idea in what part of the plant Drew was working or what he was doing, Connie Drew said. No TECO officials have talked to the Drew family.

TECO spokesman Mike Mahoney told the Times on Friday that he did not know what type of work Leandris Drew was performing at the Gannon plant and that all of its employee records were in the hands of investigators studying the cause of the explosion.

"What each individual was doing will be part of the final examiner's report" available sometime next week, Mahoney said.

Mahoney said he doubted that Drew's job at the plant was a complex one.

"Most of our power plant personnel are highly skilled, highly trained people who would not come from a labor pool," he said.

But it is clear that the Gannon plant frequently employs day laborers.

Mike Badger and Sidney Alexander were hanging around outside the Team Day Labor office Friday, talking with other day workers and drinking 40-ounce Budweisers. Both Badger and Alexander said that often there are 25 to 35 day laborers working at the Gannon plant for $5.87 an hour. They do the manual labor no one else wants to do, they said, in conditions that sometimes are hot enough to sear the soles of their boots.

Badger said he shovels coal at the plant and will continue to do so. He needs the money.

Alexander said he has filled in as an assistant to mechanics and washed down the generators, like the one that exploded. Alexander said he often didn't feel safe at the Gannon plant.

"We talked about how things could go wrong all the time," Alexander said. "But in the time I worked out there, nothing occurred."

Leandris Drew's mother, Jacqueline Hunter, and her husband, Charles Hunter, came to Tampa from their home in Hollywood, Fla., as soon as they heard the news, Connie Drew said. Friday afternoon, everyone waiting at the hospital was given renewed hope: Hospital officials upgraded Drew's condition from critical to serious.

While they wait, his family is heartened at small signs: Leandris opening his eyes, squeezing his stepmother's finger, telling his sister he loves her.

Connie Drew has a few questions for TECO about her stepson, such as, was he wearing protective gear?

To her knowledge, she said, he has never worked at a power plant or had any training in that kind of environment.

"I would like to know what kind of work he was doing, as an unskilled laborer," she said. "It's not like he was at Morrison's washing dishes."

-- Times staff writer Angela Moore contributed to this report.