After the Storms

By Virginia Vaughan
Former Special Project Employee, Marketing

Like many Americans seeing Hurricanes Katrina and Rita pummel the Gulf Coast last fall, I wanted to do more than just watch the news and say “That’s really awful.” The initial human impulse is to want to help, preferably as directly and immediately as possible. The practical aspects of everyday life - jobs, family and other obligations – usually prevent us from dropping everything, taking the next flight to the disaster area and offering our services to the first disaster relief group we come across.

At the time of the hurricane, I was working part time as a special project employee in marketing for Third Sector New England, helping to organize the NonProfit Center Open House. When I expressed my desire to travel to the region to work with the Red Cross, I was told that the TSNE position would be held for me for the time that I would be away in Baton Rouge, La. 

Preparing for the Emergency No One Was Prepared for

My preparation for this assignment had actually begun last October, when I took the three Red Cross courses that volunteers are required to have before helping in a disaster. These courses provide an introduction to the Red Cross and give a basic overview of the work that is typically required of volunteers at the scene of a disaster. As it turned out, because this disaster was so much larger and more extensive than anything the Red Cross had undertaken previously and because I was volunteering several months after the hurricanes hit, my responsibilities turned out to be quite different from what I had expected to be doing. More on that later.

In a “normal” disaster, Red Cross assistance focuses on meeting the victims’ immediate emergency needs. Typically, this can involve providing food, clothing, short-term shelter and access to medical care. In some cases, as when a few families have been displaced by a fire, the Red Cross will cover three or four nights in a hotel and provide enough money to feed a family for a few days; in others, with a larger number of victims, the Red Cross may need to open a temporary shelter and kitchen. Depending on the amount of damage the victims have sustained, a small amount of financial assistance (currently no more than $1,565 for a family of five or more) may be provided. This money is intended to help the victims replace lost clothing and purchase other items needed to meet their immediate needs.

Because of this focus on helping people recover from the immediate emergency created by the disaster, the Red Cross does not typically provide direct long-term assistance. Once the initial emergency needs of the victims have been met, Red Cross caseworkers will work with people to connect them with local, state and federal resources that can help in their recovery. For instance, they might connect them with local agencies that can help them find housing, or a caseworker may assist a family in applying for federal loan programs. The goal is to enable victims of a disaster to independently resume their normal daily activities as quickly as possible.

Old Ways of Meeting New Needs

However, like disasters, disaster relief work doesn’t always follow the expected plan. And of course this was especially true in the case of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which were “off the charts” in almost every respect. In the days and weeks immediately after the hurricanes hit, the Red Cross provided food, shelter, and other emergency assistance to over a million people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Florida. They mounted the sort of relief operation that they have done many times in response to past hurricanes and other disasters, but on a vastly larger scale.

At the time that I was volunteering, several months after the hurricanes, most people had resolved their immediate, disaster-caused needs one way or another, at least to a minimal level. But this was no ordinary disaster and the long-term needs of the disaster victims were, and continue to be, enormous and pressing. In order to respond effectively to this unprecedented need for a long-term response, the Red Cross decided that it needed to begin planning for programs in collaboration with other NGOs in order to support these rebuilding efforts. However, there was still a large backlog of requests for aid that had not yet been evaluated. And each of these cases needed to be resolved before the long-term response could be put into action.

Struggling to Help Those Struggling

Thus, the job that I and several other volunteers were asked to do in Baton Rouge was to contact people whose cases were still open, interview them about their current needs, and determine if they qualified for financial assistance from the Red Cross. Most of these cases were not from the most heavily damaged areas. In many cases it was clear that the family did not qualify for Red Cross emergency aid, either because they had already received financial aid from the Red Cross or because the damage to their homes, while extensive, fell short of rendering them “uninhabitable.”

(Remember, as we volunteers were often reminded, the mission of the Red Cross is to provide immediate, emergency assistance. For better or worse, we had to accept that Red Cross financial assistance to families is not intended to fund the rebuilding of damaged homes.) There were some people who were clearly still in need of emergency aid, and it was always very satisfying to be able to arrange for them to receive it. Unfortunately, at this stage of the relief effort this was not usually the case, and too often it was my unhappy job to tell the clients, almost all of whom were still struggling to recover, that they did not qualify for financial aid.

Of course, all of the other types of aid that the Red Cross provides to disaster victims – referrals to other agencies, medical and mental health support, mobile food deliveries to neighborhoods where people have returned to work on their houses, even some clean-up supplies – were still available. But that was not usually what these folks were hoping for.

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