I volunteer with my local Red Cross chapter as a trained national Disaster relief Worker and local disaster response team. In October I went To Lufkin, TX to help out with the Katrina and Rita disasters. It was a very rewarding experience and I would recomomend it to anyone. Below is a few pictures I took and something I put together for a newsletter about my experience.
My job was shelter operations. I had to feed and take care of hundreds of people all displaced by Katrina and Rita last month. I signed up with the Red Cross right after Katrina happened. I felt that if I could somehow get down there to help I could make a difference. I went to a one day training class at the Stockton Red Cross center for shelter operations.
Then I was off to Austin,TX. The next day I arrived at the Red Cross headquarters, where hundreds of volunteers were being checked in and randomly assembled into disaster teams. We formed teams of eight, exchanged cell numbers and picked a team leader then waited to be assigned to a shelter. It was a "hurry up and wait" type situation. The next day we got our assignment, Pentecostal Church Camp, in
Lufkin,TX.
So we were off in our rental cars for a 7 hr trek with a break in Dallas. Lufkin is in south/west Texas near the Louisiana boarder just north of Beaumont and Port Arthur, which had been completely destroyed. Rita had just hit four days before I got to the shelter, so when I got there it was running at full capacity. We were housing some 800 people plus we fed some 400 people displaced but not in the shelter. Half of the people staying at the shelter were from Louisiana for Katrina and half were from Texas because of Rita.
The whole experience actually seems like one long day. I would start early in the morning and go around the camp with my golf cart and pick up trash. Then I would stop around 6:30 and start helping with getting breakfast ready. Breakfast was at 7:30, lunch at noon, and dinner around 6:30. All meals were all served in the same fashion. We had to set up the mess hall each morning because that's where everyone slept the night before. Food would come from a delivery truck from Red Cross or the Salvation Army and we would serve food in a chow line, kind of like a school cafeteria. It is really neat to see how fast and easy it is to feed so many people.
We never ran out of food, people always had seconds, and desert with dinner. The food was not bad, we had what tasted like Tri-tip one night. Water was in aluminum cans brought by FEMA. Anheuser-Busch donated 321,000 cans of filtered water which we jokingly referred to as "Baptist Beer". Aluminum makes water taste like metal.
My duty besides feeding was to take care of the dorms. I had to go in each morning and bring sick people food, find out what peoples needs were, and resolve personal conflicts. I would visit the dorms at least 2 times or more a day. We had our own laundry system developed, I would pick up pillow cases with numbers on them indicating ownership and pick up black trash bags of linins each day they would be sent out to be processed at a laundry and then brought back the next day. There were medical issues like people needing medication but lost their prescriptions. There were many questions like "where is the FEMA and red cross money?, When can we go home?, What are we supposed to do now?. We were the Red Cross representatives; the thing is we knew as much as they did. My answer always was "I can get you food and I can get you shelter and I can get you supplies but I have no idea when the money is coming, if I did have an answer it would just be a rumor anyways." There can be issues 24 hours a day at a shelter.
So even though we were working 12-16 hours a day and everyone was always sick with something. I was never tired. There was always something to do. I got all my energy from those who we were helping. The whole experience really puts things into prospective. Because everyone pitched in things got done and money got to the people. People who had little before the hurricanes now had nothing. They needed a jumpstart to their new lives. It took a long time to get things organized but we eventually got each family set up with 18 months of temp housing and emergency funds from FEMA and Red Cross. Texans helped by having huge job fairs employing anyone who was willing to work.
This was one of the few pictures I took with some folks who were staying at the shelter. I cant remember there names but they are both from Beaumont, Tx where there house was completely destroyed. .
This is outside the shelter at night. Usually people would all gather around after dinner and the preachers would start there preaching it was wild.
First night in Lufkin at a Staff shelter in a church.
At the Red Cross Headquarters in Austin, Tx waiting to be deployed.
My Tracy Press Picture I was on the Front Page!
In the future, I plan on working closely with the Red Cross here in our area to be a part of the local disaster relief/emergency response team for San Joaquin County.
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Brian Barringer, Red Cross, personal, Tracy Press, Lufkin, Tx, Katrina, Rita, Hurricane, Flood, shelter, Texas, Dallas, Beaumont, Port Arthur, pentecostal
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