30 days with Crisis Corps

Katrina and I Tuesday, October, 11 2005

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I returned Saturday, October 9th from Louisiana. I am glad I went; glad to be home. I made no significant contribution, nor did I have much direct contact with victims of the hurricane, but, through daily contact with other folks in the field I experienced success and frustrations, saw both the competence and incompetence of FEMA, and decided to add a hyphen in “bureau-cracy.” Technically, this was a “Crisis Corps” assignment –for people who have done their two years of Peace Corps. But since, nobody has ever heard of the Crisis Corps, we were “Peace Corps.” I picked up a cotton hat at K-mart before leaving, turned it inside out, wrote “Peace Corps” on the band and wore it most of my waking hours. That was partly to identify myself with Peace Corps, often to keep sun out of my eyes, but mostly to control my hair which I didn’t have a chance to cut before going and which went crazy in the heat and humidity.

Phase One, Training.

I arrived in Orlando about 5pm on the 9th. That made me a part of the group of 14 former Peace Corps volunteers called “9-10,” because we registered with FEMA on the 10th. Had I arrived a few hours earlier I would have been a 9-9, and gone with them to Mississippi. After finger printing and ID-tagging on the 10th we did two days of training on the 11th and 12th. We were part of a 100 person training class -- the others mostly from Homeland Security agencies such as Customs and Immigration. It had been a 3-day course, but they cut it down with pressure from above and below. We were trained to handle FEMA Individual Assistance in the field --tying into the FEMA computer system. One funny moment for me was when they handed us three pages of acronyms we had to know to speak the language. Our instructors couldn’t understand why some of us laughed. Other than a hot-humid walk into the neighborhood and around a lake behind the motel I didn’t see much of Orlando. This was the beginning of 30 days in which my love of being a pedestrian was frustrated by places that don’t seem to know such a species exists. At our hotel, there was a pool and a free happy hour, so we had plenty of evening time to get to know each other, the groups ahead of us and those coming behind us.

Phase Two, Wait, Hurry up and wait.

We got our assignment to Baton Rouge about 5pm on the 12th, but travel arrangements were impossible for most of us until the 14th. So many people were trying to leave Orlando, and so many more were trying to get near the Katrina impact area. At the Baton Rouge airport, to our surprise, there were rental cars. As we left in a van rented by one Peace Corps volunteer we saw the auto-haul trucks that the rental agencies were using to bring in hundreds of cars. Baton Rouge has about doubled in population from Evacuees and helpers so traffic jams were the norm most hours, most days. When we reported to the JFO (FEMA headquarters, the Joint Field Office, which is in a large, defunct shopping center near downtown Baton Rouge), we were ushered to two long rows of tables where we joined others who had come to know the tables well waiting for job assignments. We were greeted by Debbie who showed obvious frustration with being assigned the task to find work for the hoards arriving. For those of us trained in Individual Assistance the problem was that we should work in DRCs (disaster recovery centers), but they require buildings, leases, utilities, phones. There weren’t many open. Nevertheless, we began the rhythm of 12-hour days seven days a week. We went across the river to the tent city in Port Allen where I would live most of the time. The location was about 2 city blocks large next to a lock on a shipping channel. The sleeping tents and mess tents are huge, floored in plywood --think circus with no acrobats. They are air-conditioned with octopus-like portable units using 18-inch diameter tubes similar to the flexible plastic vents one can get for a dryer. The food is great, and the opportunity to commune with a broad range of folks and watch their comings and goings was good. We had to leave our tent city for three days during hurricane Rita and felt like we were coming home when we returned.

Phase Three, Slow down and wait.

On our second day of waiting for assignment we volunteered for a new effort –get the thousands of sheltered people out of shelters into the thousands of travel trailers that were headed for Louisiana. This was the 15th. Until a few days before I came home, this project had few trailers to fill –none for the first week. Our initial group of ten or so grew to about 20 as several firefighters were added. Needless to say, frustrations grew. The next day about 10 of us went to a shelter at Nichols State University in Thibodaux, about 35 miles west of New Orleans. We practiced filling out the simple form needed to register people for possible moves to trailers. There were about 1000 people sheltered on campus in 2 gymnasiums and Catholic center, but we were in the infirmary that had about 100 patients in what is supposed to be the nursing school. Thousands more people came through Nichols State during evacuation. Most were fed and put on busses to Houston or as far as Michigan. The staff and leadership at the shelter was impressive --a combination of local public health people and visiting disaster medical teams. In the psych. area I interviewed a Cuban man who knew little other than that he had arrived on a boat two years earlier. Another was just getting his memory back after rescuing himself, his dog, and helping in the rescue of others. Most poignant was my talk with a 54 year old woman who looked 70. She was worried that her mother might be looking for her. The mother had had an abdominal operation in Charity hospital a day or two before Katrina. I knew as I spoke to her that more than thirty bodies had been found at this hospital. Because of their infirmities, most of the people we met needed a move to a medical facility, not a trailer. But, I am glad for my brief contact with reality.

Phase Four: One day in the ruins.

The next day, in another make-work activity, three of us went to look at sites on our list of trailer sites we might be serving. The sites we saw were destined for institutional or industrial employees and would not be part of our program, but the journey took us through some of the worst of the damaged areas. In East New Orleans the water had not only risen but had come with great velocity, walls burst out, cars strewn. This was the first day that residents were being allowed back into some neighborhoods, but we saw nobody but ourselves. Later in the day we got to the French Quarter which felt like a ghost town, except for the military. In between we made it north across Lake Pontchartrain to the town of Slidell. We were in search of a good map, and had heard the Wal-Mart was open in the neighboring town. Slidell, ravaged by wind and surging water was worse than anything I could have imagined: shanties and million-dollar homes, splintered and strewn across the landscape. I saw boats on house tops and in trees. Debris was plowed off the roads like snow –everything looking like a badly designed set from a disaster movie. When we got to the Wal-Mart, business was so brisk that that there was an “in” door and “out” door. We made another stop at a pharmacy and saw no signs of price gouging.We did see hundreds of signs put up by storm chasing contractors wanting to be hired to fix people’s homes, and saw cars of individuals and groups who had shown up with tools and good-will to lend a free hand to anybody who needed it. They had signs like: “Minnesota here to Help.” I took no pictures, not wanting to be a tourist, and decided I didn’t need to go back unless my job took me there. It didn’t.

Phase Five: Jumping ship to planning 101

People in our group (some Peace Corps volunteers, a great contingent of immigration people from Vermont, D.C., and elsewhere) began to look for alternative activities until the trailer project materialized. They would show up each day and find nothing to do, go out to and volunteer for the shelter at the convention center, or an animal shelter, or man the telephones for the group trying to connect folks with missing family members or their identified remains. I tended to be off doing some small task or following a false-trailer alarm when these ventures materialized so I missed them. Consequently, I was one of the first of many to jump ship. On the 21st I offered my planning services to folks “on the 4th floor” who were trying to get something better than trailer slums out of the FEMA effort. I started work with them the next day --regretting the loss of opportunity to give direct service but seeking to make a contribution. From that day until my departure on October 8th, I helped Jorge, a planner consultant from Florida, work on schemes that would accommodate temporary trailers as transitional housing for evacuees but which (by installing utilities in a useful pattern) could evolve to permanent neighborhoods in the host communities. It was an exercise in neo-traditional planning. I was among good and intelligent people. It was my first-ever experience in a giant office space equipped with cubicles. The 4th floor houses groups ranging from our little project to the Disaster Mortuary team. There are several contractors present who are part of the housing effort. However, nobody seemed to have a clear idea of how the housing program worked or was supposed to work. This is the reason why there must be a hyphen in “bureau-cracy.” It began to be my fun-and-frustration game to ask people “who does this?” or “how does this happen?” Usually the answer was, “I don’t know.” The problem with our project is that FEMA by law is not supposed to install permanent improvements. The federal programs that do fund such tend to be slow. This tiny little exercise in planning 101 had everybody excited, but I left not knowing how we were actually going to pull it off. I developed a friendship with Jorge and could possibly go back as part of the long-term planning team but will observe from a distance for a few months before giving that serious consideration.

Phase Six: After thirty days.

I was eager to come home but found it somewhat hard to say goodbye to those who left before me and those who remained. I met and worked with fine people whom I am unlikely to see again. Most of the Peace Corp volunteers wound up in challenging assignments. Many did what we were trained to do and dealt with the hopes and frustrations of evacuees daily. Some worked under excellent FEMA leadership, others no. A few extended their service. I shared in their emotions, satisfactions, and frustrations -- as well as in the stories of others who came in and out of my little tent city.Now our attention goes to disasters in Pakistan and Central America. Marney and I wonder if Crisis Corps might take us back to Guatemala where we began in 1967.

Thanks for listening.