Photos: Cameron Mays
Last summer, I visited the harshly impacted coastal areas of Mississippi and Alabama as part of our Emergency Response role at the Governor's Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service, Volunteer Florida. Volunteer Florida is one of the few state volunteer Commissions in the country that has an official role to coordinate volunteers and donations in times of disasters. 2004's hurricane response work in Florida engaged more than 140,000 volunteers who served more than 5.9 million hours helping Floridians obtain necessities such as food, water, ice, tarps for roofs, debris removal, counseling, and many more needed services.
The State of Mississippi, in a cooperative mutual aid agreement among states, requested assistance from the state of Florida immediately after Katrina's landfall. Since that date, more than 3,800 emergency responders from all across Florida have traveled to Mississippi to take part in this historic response effort. Add the truckloads of supplies and equipment to the personnel cost, and the total comes to more than $97 million in assistance provided to Mississippi from Florida alone.
Volunteer Florida is part of this response. We have partnered with their state Commission, called Mississippi Serves, to share our experience in warehousing donated items, operating Volunteer Reception Centers to deploy volunteers, calling on national service members like AmeriCorps for assistance, start up and operate a national call center to provide information about how people can help, and to coach them on the best ways to work closely with local and state emergency managers to meet citizens’ needs.
A small team of us from Volunteer Florida canvassed Mississippi and Alabama with our counterparts and staff directors from the White House USA Freedom Corps and the Corporation for National and Community Service in search of information on needs and what systems, if any, were in place to get help quickly to the impacted areas.
Our emotions ran the gamut as we saw devastation that could only be described as overwhelming and shocking. Many times, our van was silent. In our astonishment, we lacked words to describe our emotions. We wondered where the homes, major appliances, furnishings and home treasures were. Were they lying on the bottom of the Gulf? The trees were peppered with anything made of cloth and plastic. One downtown was completely gone — disappeared — except for a lone bank vault. Other neighborhoods three miles inland had the roofs of homes lying in a bed of rubble that was formerly a house. One home, moved nearly intact, was resting on top of a railroad track. The same track was completely buckled and broken; it had acted temporarily as a levy that eventually broke.
A county official we met with was near tears as he shared their challenging days ahead, yet shared how grateful he was for the support from the state of Florida. Priorities shift as people adjust. For example, tents are important for shade and keeping supplies dry. Everyone appreciates pressure washers and the generators to run them! Gloves and cleaning supplies are in demand. Drinking water is actually getting old, but other juices are hard to find. Ready to eat foods like vienna sausage become daily staples. There is an overload of donated used clothing lying everywhere taking up valuable space and going to waste for lack to time to sort it into like sizes and types. This confirmed out belief that there are better ways to address the need for clothing.
We left charged with the passion to get things done for these communities and to get things done quickly.
The tour of damaged areas was only part of our briefing as we dined with AmeriCorps members and discussed their experience, visited the 280,000 square foot warehouse filled with donations from every state and countless countries from around the world, stopped in to see the progress of their call center, visited a busy shelter and Disaster Recovery Center, and met with relief organizations like Salvation Army and Red Cross along the way.
Our work in Florida and consulting with the other Gulf States continues, and now we are working on the national level to help improve volunteer mobilization and national service deployment.
You can get involved too. Contact your local Volunteer Center, local relief agencies, or your favorite faith or community-based organization to ask how. |
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