BEFORE THE STORM
I got a call that volunteers would be pre-positioned at Houston, Texas for a major hurricane coming into the area of New Orleans. We arrived at Houston and waited for the hurricane to hit and see where we would be sent. The second night we were asked to attend a meeting at the Astro Dome.
There were about 30 of us there and a paid Red Cross staff member addressed our group.
He told us that we needed to split into two groups and one group would work a shift from 6 pm at night until 6 am in the morning. The other group would spend the 12 hour shift working during the day. He explained to us that we would be sitting up cots that night and that we should expect a large number of people to be coming in sometime that night. He went on to give us this advice:
“You are Red Cross people and you know what to do!”
At the time, we were unaware of the magnitude of the storm that had hit New Orleans and were not aware that we had people coming who had spent time in the Super Dome and on the freeways outside of the city.
My group would work days, so we went back to our hotel and gathered some rest.
When I arrived at the Astro Dome ( a completely enclosed football stadium) the next morning, I saw that the entire football field had cots lined up in rows. Each cot touched the next cot and a second row was placed at the foot of the first row. Then an aisle was left and then a double row again ran parallel across the field. Part of the cots were already filled, the rest were filling up as a constant stream of buses brought in more displaced people from New Orleans. Eventually, we would have close to 30,000 people in the stadium before the fire dept came in and told us we had to move some out to another location,
If you have ever been in a major football stadium, you know that there are ramps leading to different levels for people to enter and exit. These ramps are wide and as the field filled, we placed cots on both sides of these ramps and eventually when we had no more room and people were still coming in, the homeless people would start sleeping in the seats. That is when the fire dept came in and we had to move a large group across the street to a large conventions center.
Try to picture these people who literally had only the clothes on their backs. They didn’t have blankets. Most didn’t even have their purse or billfold or any kind of identification. Women with small children seemed to be in the majority. Completely at our mercy for food, water, shelter and any other needs they would have.
None of the Red Cross volunteers had ever experienced any thing of this type or magnitude. And our instructions were:
“You are Red Cross people and you know what to do!”
Comments