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.