What we're doing here

While Consuelo and I are working in headquarters, hundreds of Red Cross volunteers are spread throughout Louisiana providing assistance to folks affected by the hurricanes. I thought it was time to share some of the Red Cross official images with y'all out there, so you could see what we'all are up to down here.

The shelter in the picture is empty, but that's just because we don't publicize pictures of shelters with residents in them. But you get the idea of how much room each person gets to sleep, store their belongings, and relax to wait until their homes are OK to go back to, or they find another place to stay. You might think that the space is too small. But keep in mind that the Red Cross mission is to provide basic needs, and a safe place to sleep doesn't need to be large.

We have about 112 of these food delivery trucks delivering food throughout the affected areas. Some of them park in fixed locations, and our clients come to the truck. Others circulate through less densely populated neighborhoods and deliver directly to the residents who may still be in their homes but without facilities to cook.

Driving these ERV trucks is rewarding for the volunteers, as they come into contact with grateful clients. But they work a long, hard day. They start early each morning, driving from the staff shelter to the kitchen, loading supplies, water, and food. The hot food goes into 'Cambro' containers, which keep food hot for hours. Even so, ERV drivers check the temperature of the food often, and if it drops below a safe temperature, it is discarded.

After they have delivered their load, they return to the kitchen, sanitize their truck and everything in it, and return to their shelter for the night. Many ERV drivers work 14 hour days. An a Cambro full of food weighs around 50 lbs, so they do some heavy lifting. They are some of my heroes.
Other Red Cross workers go into the damaged neighborhoods to perform damage assessment. The Red Cross has several categories for describing damage. The first two are "completely destroyed" and "severe damage". The mobile home in this picture is "completely destroyed." The damage assessment teams cover every street in every neighborhood affected by a hurricane, and collect reports on specific addresses. Our operation for Gustav is one of the first to use handheld electronic devices (like Palm Pilots) to collect this information, speeding the download into out computer systems. Unfortunately, we did not have enough devices for all the workers needed here, so some areas were still covered by paper reports.

Still other Red Cross workers offer small financial support to families whose homes have been seriously damaged. These client assistance workers meet with the families where they can find them, often in shelters, and connect the families with the damage reports.

(All photos by Gene Daley, American Red Cross)

The Rollover

We're just about done with our third week with the Red Cross in Baton Rouge. The shelter population is dwindling. Feeding is slowing in Louisiana, though Texas is still going strong. We still have almost 1300 visiting volunteers on the ground here, and several hundred local volunteers who go home every night.

The rollover is my term for the time when most of the volunteers come to the end of their typical 3 week deployment and go home. Even though our needs for staff are falling, we still need to keep certain parts of the operation running at full speed, like our staffing department. So new volunteers are deployed to fill in where others have left. Thus the staff rolls over to some degree.

Part of the function of the group that is working for me is to greet and register arriving staff. The same folks complete the paperwork when staff finishes the job and sends them off to home. These days we have an active mix of both types coming and going throughout the day. A crew of 7 people is working these tasks for me, and since they are people, we have to accommodate days off (about 1 every 8-9 days) and illness, which is probably a little higher than normal life because most of the staff is sleeping in staff shelters and colds can spread more easily.

Since I've been on the job, nearly my entire team has rolled over. I have an excellent supervisor who keeps thing running smoothly, leaving me time to interact with all of the other groups in the operation to chase down corrections in their rosters, and to find answers to the exceptional questions that keep life interesting in headquarters.

Since the Red Cross has been up and running for over 100 years, you might think that we have found the best way to do just about everything that we do. But every disaster operation brings new wrinkles, and this one is no exception. For example, because volunteers that flew into Louisiana arrived and deployed throughout the state before Gustav arrived, we have airline tickets in place in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Alexandria, and Monroe. We also have a significant number that transferred her from along the Gulf Coast. As the operation progressed, the need for staff shifted from eastern part of LA, up to Shreveport in the NW, to the southwestern parts of LA affected by Ike. So we have a lot of folks in the south with tickets to fly home from Shreveport.

To handle this as smoothly as possible, we have a guideline which is based on the cost of changing a ticket with the airline. If the cost exceeds a set amount, then the volunteer will have to return to the ticketed city to depart. Otherwise they can change their ticket and fly home from the nearest airport. It's a blend of using the dollar wisely and using the volunteer wisely.

Rental cars fit into this guideline as well. I've been told that Avis, our primary partner for rental cars, has agreed to waive the drop off fee if we need to leave a car at a different location than it was picked up from. Before they agreed to do that, I know of at least one volunteer that needed to drive from Baton Rouge back to Dallas to drop his car and catch his flight.

Other exceptions don't fit the guideline so easily. Today, we handled a worker who ended up in Lafayette without a rental car, and had to fly out from Baton Rouge. Since part of our job in staffing is to take care of the volunteer, we get involved in such problems. The solution here was easy, since we have couriers moving documents and small amounts of urgently needed supplies within the operation. The volunteer in Lafayette will simple catch a ride with the courier on the day he needs to be here.

The more difficult problems usually include money, things like reimbursing a volunteer for ordinary expenses when the power was out and credit cards don't work and receipts don't get printed. Or a volunteer gets well intended but incorrect advice from a supervisor or their chapter on what expenses are allowed. In such cases, staffing talks with Red Cross headquarters to permit the exception.

The largest on I heard of on this job is that of an ERV driver. ERVs are those red and white trucks that often serve as billboards for the Red Cross in photos of us in the field. They pick up food in Cambro containers at a kitchen and deliver it to people where they live.

This particular driver was deployed from California to be prepared for Gustav in Texas. Since Gustav didn't trouble Texas too much, he was sent to Florida in preparation for Ike. That didn't happen there, either. So they turned him around, back to Texas for Ike. Along the way, the ERV broke down, and the driver got it fixed, which took a few days.

Meanwhile, the ERV driver did not have a PHH gas card which most ERVs carry to pay for fuel. And he had to stay in motel rooms and pay for meals and incidentals along the way. To cover these costs, he needed to use his own credit card with his personal money.

As he finished his 3 week tour, he was about $2000 into his own money. This far exceeds any guidelines we have, and is so unusual, it took a while for us to convince National staff that he was telling the truth. All perfectly reasonable, but highly exceptional.

Perhaps the larger issue for the volunteer was that he took 3 weeks out of his life and never got to do what he came here for, to feed hungry people from his ERV.

We have decided to extend our deployment with the Red Cross. Consuelo will stay one more week in a new job, working with the In Kind Department, which arranges for donations of goods and services to the Operation. I will stay longer, until my department is ready to close, maybe for another 2 weeks. We will get another day off on Sunday.

The Second 10 Days

The winds of Ike are blowing hard southwest of us, but just a strong breeze (read: small craft warnings) here in Baton Rouge. The Red Cross is strong on preparedness, so my trip to New Orleans got cancelled today, and headquarters shut down at 2:00 so we could stay out if the worst of the traffic. Then, when we got to the hotel where we're staying, the power was out for 3 hours, then on and off three or four times before it stayed on around 7:30.

The TV is now displaying all the tornado watches and warnings near here, all in the LA parishes SW of here, towards Texas. By and large, the Cajuns have been pretty laid back in the face of all that's going on here, but I think we're all getting a bit weather weary.

Not sure what will happen next, but I'm thinking we'll got back to Maine when our term is up on September 22nd. Consuelo has a cold, along with lots of other people at HQ. Most of them are sleeping in shelters, where colds spread like wildfire. So far, I've stayed immune, but I'm sure that won't last.

My work has been handicapped by no power, no network, no server, slooooow communications. It makes me wonder whether all this technology that the Red Cross depends on is really the right lone solution. But we keep pushing on, and when we're not, we're sitting on our hands.

For the geeks that might read this, a major Red Cross Disaster Response (DR) runs on lots of laptops, backed up by a major server with full backup. The function is to procure, track and manage resources needed to support the operation, such as finances, supplies (food, toilet paper), and our staff. Reports are produced daily, indicating measures of activity, like how many shelters are open, how many staff are on the ground, and how many rental cars we have. The disaster itself is measured by our disaster assessment team, who travel through the affected area to inspect the actual damage. After that is done, client caseworkers provide dollars for victims with immediate needs.

The laptops tie into an ethernet network, which connects with our national sites by T1 if available, or via a high speed satellite link. For our personnel database, we run an application that talks to a remote database across the network. If the network is down, we wait. If the application hiccups, we wait. Over the last 3 days, we have had less than one full day of useful work time. I got more work done in 2 hours in my staff lodging than I did in two days at HQ, because of program/network problems.

And of course, we have the GIGO function. I estimate that there are about 40 people feeding data into the database for this operation alone. My job is to make the data as accurate as possible. I am quickly reminded of the EDS commercial showing the cowboy herding cats. In my opinion the job is not to provide 100% accuracy, but rather to allow management to quickly spot trends and maneuver resources to be most effective. The response to Gustav has tested this need exhaustively, as we've arrived, prepared mega-shelters, pulled them down, then put them back in place for Ike. Some of the staff feels like they're on a merry-go-round, and others have been twiddling their thumbs in both directions, but the news about Gustav died down rapidly after the storm, and to me that's a good sign that we got our job done.

Our the mission is a valuable one, we address a need that is not met in quite the same way as any other organization. Some folks think that we compete with the Salvation Army, but I don't think so. Our focus is on providing immediate need after a disaster, and I think the Salvation Army is around all the time. SA doesn't do disaster assessment, and to the degree possible, we're trying to cooperate with FEMA on this. But our standards are different than FEMA, we have more granularity. And we intend to disappear, or at least dissolve back into the local chapters, that are always responding to local disasters like apartment fires.

Tomorrow, if time permits, I'll take more classes to further acquaint myself with other portions of a disaster operation. Then I can be more of a know-it-all.

Back to the Disaster

We got called back to work for the Red Cross in response to hurricane Gustav. We arrived late Sunday night, August 31, and the hurricane arrived about 8:00 the next morning.

All of the response organizations were on the ground here before the hurricane. We had Red Cross, FEMA, USArmy, as well as press members traveling on our final leg of the flight to Baton Rouge.

Inside the staff shelter

From the airport, we rented a van for the 5 Red Cross staff and drove to Woodlawn church, which had been set up as a staff shelter. In the gym, 100 cots were set up, and the dining area had tables and chairs, and a TV that people crowded around to get the latest weather news. This was our first time to stay in a staff shelter, and we included sheets, pillows, towels, and extra medical supplies as if we were going to backpack in the hills. Cots were provided, and about 95 folks slept in the gym.

On Monday, all staff stayed in place during the hurricane. Based on the wind maps we now have available, Gustav came ashore as a cat 2 hurricane, and bashed through Baton Rouge as a cat 1 hurricane, with sustained winds of 80 to 100 mph. We looked out windows, stood on the lee side of the building and watched the tree tops violently whipping back and forth. At around 8:30 AM, the power went out. Throughout the day, we watched and waited, got to know other staffers.

Our food that day was 'heater meals' and standard Red Cross snacks, cookies, chips and the like. Bottled water was the vintage drink. Heater meals are a pouch of food with a piece of specially treated cardboard. You stuff it all in a plastic bag and pour in some water, and in 10 minutes it's hot. Some of it was pretty good, and it was very high in calories, since people eating these meals may not eat regularly. I tell people that I don't come to the disaster for the food or the fancy hotel rooms.

Toppled steeple

About 10:00 the steeple blew off on the church we were in. Throughout the morning, the wind blew hard against the back of the building, rattling the walls and forcing some rain under the wall at the edge of the gym, which just happened to be where our cots were placed. We rearranged the room to leave a space along the wall to clean up the water as it came in.

In case you're wondering how people are arranged in a shelter, we had women to the left and men to the right. In our second shelter, they had a section for married couples. The church had 2 sets of bathrooms, and a grand total of one shower per sex. After we lost power, we lost hot water, too.

AC ducts blown off

Later in the morning, we heard metal banging against the windward walls of the church outside the gym. We thought perhaps the wall was coming apart, but it was only the air conditioning ducts being blown off the building.

By Monday afternoon, the winds had slowed a little, and our shelter staff manage to set up 2 small generators outside and to run extension cords into the dining and sleeping areas so that we had about 4 light bulbs. And we had the TV, of course. The local stations stayed on the air and kept us up to date on the status of damage and other important information. But we still had to use our flashlights in the bathrooms. If you can, imagine standing with a flashlight cord between your teeth while you pee, hoping you don't drop it into the urinal.

Sleeping on Monday night was more difficult. We had no AC, no power, and left the doors of the shelter open to capture whatever breeze we could, but the overnight temps were in the 70s and the humidity condensed on the tile floors, making them slippery and dangerous. Snoring was prevalent, all the CPAP users were without power. But we got through the night.

Tuesday we drove to Red Cross headquarters. We saw power poles toppled, billboards crashed to the ground, street signs blown every which way. A few of those long, long stop light arms over 4 lane boulevards had been blown around to new positions. There was no power anywhere that we could see. Every business was closed. When we got to HQ, they, too, had no power, so they sent us back to our shelter to wait until we could get our generator up at HQ. We drove back to the church and began cleaning up the tree debris in the parking lot there.

Since stop lights were out throughout the city, all signals were declared to be 4 way stops. During the day, this worked pretty well. But after dark, it was very difficult to see intersections and lights in the dark. I ran a few intersections which had little or no cross traffic because I couldn't see them.

Tuesday morning, there was some confusion as to where we were supposed to go, but we found our former manager from Indiana and she made sure that we stayed in her department, taking care of the HR function. We got to work.

Now, it's a week later. We've been working 12-14 hour days since last Tuesday, and we have our first day off. We need to do laundy, and all the laundromats have been closed, due to no power. We were among the very fortunate few to get hotel rooms, so we've been able to get showers. But 2100 other Red Cross staff are mostly still staying in staff shelters.

The primary care needs are beginning to wind down. Only 2000 people slept in shelters last night, down from about 45,000 one week ago. We're still feeding over 100,000 meals a day from 13 mobile kitchens. Our disaster assessment teams are getting done. The client assistance portion of the job is just ramping up, and our staff will be out in the damaged neighborhoods going door to door to see that people are OK and offer assistance where necessary and appropriate.

Red Cross has been doing planning and stockpiling resources in preparation for Ike. Right now, that looks to be less of a problem than we expected. That's OK. I've had enough hurricane immersion for now.

I'll report more later, if and when we get another day off.