Hurricane Sandy – Red Cross Day 1
Chaotic first day. This is a level 7 relief effort. Katrina was a 5. Estimated $50 billion impact. 44,000 still without power. The Red Cross CEO told a story of a tall building with elderly residents who haven’t had power or anything to eat for over a week. Today was mostly going from the Greater NY Chapter’s first floor to the fourth floor to the first floor to the fourth floor to the first floor and so on throughout the day trying to get my assignment with many others that start their deployment today as well. We went through orientation and general discussions on how to deal with the transportation in NYC, where to find laundry services, general statistics on how huge this effort is, and how to deal with the emotional and psychological impact of what I’ll be dealing with over the next two weeks.
As the only training that I had was on sheltering, that was my initial assignment when I left home. When I got there last night, I met Angie Quiñones, straight from Puerto Rico, on the shuttle to the hotel and she and I were roommates for that first night. While waiting for our assignments this morning, we decided that we wanted to stay together and be a translation team (she speaks spanish and I can understand her english pretty well) – so together we were a pretty good team.
As we waited to be called for our shelter, they told us to go have lunch because it might be a while. At lunch I saw the dog at the counter in the picture I’ve attached here. So cute. When we got back to the chapter, we found out they were closing down some of the shelters and asked for volunteers to switch to Bulk Distribution. I said yes. Best choice I could have made. So Angie and I went back up to the fourth floor to figure out what to do next and ended up helping make signs to hang up on the walls and input data into the computers for the Bulk Distribution roster. I had absolutely NO IDEA what I would be doing in bulk distribution or what that really meant.
Before I knew it, night was upon us and it had been a long day of wandering and wondering and stress of not knowing where I would be, what I would be doing and what I would see. Angie and I went out that night to Time Square to walk for just a bit and enjoy the last night of freedom before the real work started.
