American Red Cross - Preparing for and Responding to Hurricane Katrina

American Red Cross - Preparing for and Responding to Hurricane Katrina
Since there actually are a few people who read Experiment 33, but are not yet personal friends, I wanted to let you know how things are for us in Baton Rouge in the aftermath of Katrina. As you might have already seen, I posted a couple of mid storm pics. If you follow the links to flickr, you can also find a few post-storm pics. We fared very well. Baton Rouge was on the western side of the storm and that is the weaker side. There are a lot of downed trees and power lines, but we were personally lucky and only lost power for about half a day on Monday.

I am back to work today, though it feels very wrong. Yesterday Janet and I began to volunteer for the Red Cross. I urge any of you who can, to folow the above link and donate whatever you can. The need is indescribable. The following tries to describe what our volunteer experience was like last night:

We reported to the main Red Cross office to get briefed, then headed into the field. It was really nice to find several friends showed up to help at the same time, so we became a team.

The shelters were located in public schools throughout the city, but the schools reopened today, so our first job was to help transport food and equipment from the schools to the River Center (big downtown arena) which was becoming the main shelter. The Red Cross is almost entirely volunteer, and it was really an interesting study of organic leadership (when I have time to
reflect anyway, at the time it was a little chaotic and unnerving). I ended up driving a big moving van full of food, and the rest of the team followed in cars. I was the first of the vans to arrive and noone was expecting me yet (we were supposed to pack the van
at the school, but someone had already taken care of that). We eventually manuvered into the loading dock area only to find that the big truck door was locked and there was no key. Shortly after, other trucks started to arrive, so we unloaded them.

The River Center is being completely generous. With so much food and other items arriving all at once, they just opened up everything to us and we just had to make our own decisions about where to put things. When a group dropped off 6 oxygen tanks, Janet took it upon herself to move them off the dock to a secure area since she's been trained on how to safely move the explosive tanks. She then went and found the medical volunteers to let them know where the tanks were. There were so many people helping, it was amazing to see how smoothly we all worked together.

While we were doing this, thousands of people were coming into the shelter. We worked for several hours unloading, then took a break to rejuvenate ourselves. At that point, I ran into a couple of teenage volunteers who got separated from their original team
and they were sort of stranded at the River Center. I offered to take them back to the main Red Cross building and luckily we found their parents there waiting. Janet was working more on the floor. She helped organize the food lines, and then wound up carrying food out to people who couldn't get in lines themselves.

On my way back to the River Center I confirmed that I did indeed have to come back to work today. I also recognized my exhaustion as I sat down for the first time in while. So when I got back, I found Janet and she was ready to go as well. We'll be back tonight and for many nights to come.