Flying Home

ERVs ready to go home

By the end of September, things are winding down on DR159 in Baton Rouge. Only a handful of ERVs are still binging food to the damaged neighborhoods, so the rest are gathered at headquarters in Baton Rouge and washed, repaired, checked, and replenished with supplies. Many of the original crew members have already returned home, so new drivers are found, and in some cases flown in to return them to their custodial chapters throughout the USA.

I took an opportunity to speak with the Public Affairs group, to see if my skills and intuition were suitable to work as a volunteer taking photographs and writing stories on an operation such as this. Sharing the work we are doing is important to reveal our contributions to the general public, and to our donors as well. I gave them a link to this blog as a reference, and they said I would be welcome to come work for them, after I had taken the appropriate training. So I may do that in the future.

The triplets

Working at headquarters is not without a little fun and an occasional hi-jinx to lighten the mood. Early in the operation, the job director brought in a Bayou Bengal, a stuffed tiger named after the LSU mascot. The tiger would be handed off every day as an acknowledgement of a job well done by a group or department. At first, it was simply handed off, but when it was my turn to give it away, I made up a story about how the tiger was actually a Red Cross volunteer, that it was assigned to do mental health, and I had filled out an official transfer form to give it away to the next department. Over the next few days, the tiger story grew and grew, one day having had triplets who were abandoned in a staff shelter and fleeing to Texas under the "safe haven law". The triplets got name tags, Faye, Gustav and Ike, after the 3 hurricanes that had ravaged Louisiana this year. The mother returned, blamed Tony the Tiger as the father, and was put up in a hotel. And on, and on.and on.

On September 29th, Consuelo departed Baton Rouge and flew back to Maine. She had spent 4 weeks on the job with Red Cross, working 3 weeks in staffing and the last week in In-Kind donations. In-Kind is part of the Material Supply System that organized donations made to the Red Cross. These could be corporate donations such as pallets of canned water from Anheuser-Busch to a 10 minute a capella concert by the Phi Mu Alpha Symphtones, which we had in headquarters one day. Working in In-Kind gave her a different view of the operation, but I think she still likes working with people more than stuff.

On Tuesday, October 7th, I flew home from Baton Rouge, having spent 5 weeks on the job, with 2 days off. I felt a sens of accomplishment for the job I did, and my performance evaluation reflected that.

By noon on Monday, I began finishing up the tasks I had left on my desk, made a few final changes to the personnel database, and turned in my cell phone. I checked out my rental car, which would be returned to the airport on the next day. I showed Martha Fortenberry how to generate the data for the daily report using a spreadsheet I designed, that reduced a 2 hour job to about 10 minutes. It was faster and easier, but a little tricky, and non-programmers might easily make stumbles along the way.

Decorations at Boutin's

On Monday night, 8 of the remaining staff got together at Boutin's, an authentic bayou restaurant that served alligator and frogs legs, mudbugs, and catfish. It was a goodbye dinner for all, since the numbers in headquarters had dwindled significantly, with under 200 visiting volunteers like us on the job in Louisiana.

After dinner, I went to the hotel, packed my bag, and requested a 5:00 AM wake up call. I got to the airport OK, but initially parked my Hertz rental car in the Avis return spot. This because when we arrived, we got a car from Avis. But I quickly realized my mistake, and move on to the Hertz spots.

Air travel into Atlanta was predictably delayed, and I was about 10 minutes late making my connection for a flight at 10:50 to Boston. Fortunately there was another 12:05 flight to Boston, and it had room for me. And as I write this, I gliding over Long Island Sound as the plane begins its descent.

I'm tired. It has been a long 5 weeks, coming out of retirement to work 10-11 hour days, witnessing 2 hurricanes, and out of touch with my normal routines of life. The food has been OK, but difficult to manage in a healthy way, and I expect I have gained another 6-7 pounds, as I did in Indiana and had not worked off. I miss cooking, I miss my puppy, and for the last week, I ,missed Consuelo.

But the work is rewarding. I was literally moved to tears several times by the commitment of all the volunteers that showed up, taking chunks of time out of their lives, many far more precious than mine, to help other out in times of disaster. It is heartwarming to be part of a group whose principles include minimizing human suffering, and whose mission is to bridge the gap between the initial response and the long term recovery. As my health and finances permit, I will continue to offer my services in this cause.

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.