Assignment: Florida 2004...
One ham's experience with the
hurricane relief effort

The following is a report from John Amos KC6TVM, a local Santa Clara County (CA) Ham Radio Operator and member of San Jose RACES, who volunteered for duty with FEMA in support of the hurricane relief effort in Florida. 

28 September 2004.  As most of you know, I answered a draft to go down to the hurricane disaster area for FEMA a couple of weeks ago.  This is just a summary to let everyone know that I'm back and I survived.  I got to Atlanta on Friday morning 9/10, did a couple of days of registration and training, then did the Army thing for four days: get there at eight in the morning in order to wait until 5 and go back to my hotel. Just me and about 600 of my closest friends!

In reality, FEMA has apparently never done a mass draft like this one and they were pretty swamped.  Normally FEMA comes in three or four weeks after the disaster and sets up Disaster Recovery Offices with their own personnel where the local people can register for aid in person. This one was big enough that FEMA management decided to do the registration on the phone in a much shorter time than usual.  They tried, more or less successfully, to saturate the disaster area with volunteers to get the phone number in people's hands.

My team of 50 got moved to Birmingham, Alabama, on Wednesday evening 9/15 and then we huddled in our hotel until (by then) Tropical Storm Ivan went by.  We finally got dispatched to the field on Saturday 9/15 and it was pretty shocking. I have been through four major earthquakes in California (plus innumerable fires) and this was more than I have ever seen.

I was in Escambia County, just across the Florida/Alabama border from the Florida panhandle. Population maybe 40 thousand, no major towns, plus when I got there, no power, maybe 25 working phones in the county, and even the county EOC had only a dinky little 1.5 kw portable generator.  The roads were mostly clear only because the day after Ivan came through, EVERYBODY cleared trees.  We were strictly warned not to ever go near a downed power line, but as soon as we got off Interstate 65 we started going over power lines.  If we had actually followed instructions, we would never have gotten past the Interstate off-ramp.

And I can't begin to tell you what it looked like. Probably a fifth of the trees in the county were down, many of them on mobile homes or houses, no stores were open so no one could get gas or food, some of the water systems were contaminated, it was appalling.  My job was to get the word out that FEMA has money and how to register to get some.  I spent most of my time at a distribution site where the local agencies were giving out water, MREs, and ice.  I would approach the cars as they went through the line and try to chat them up about FEMA, with some success.  I got a lot of appreciation for being there and almost no adverse reactions at all.  A couple of people said that they didn't take handouts, which seems a little stiff-necked under the circumstances.  On the other hand, almost every one was very grateful to us for anything we could do.

A lot of the work was simply critical incident stress management, meaning listening to people and telling them that it would be okay.  The area hasn't much money, so a lot of the people I talked to had no insurance to cover damages.  Two different local women simply broke into tears talking to me - all I could do was pat their hand and be sympathetic.  Another woman told me in a very calm voice that her husband had moved out a few weeks ago and she didn't know where he was, so she took her two kids over to her mother's for company the night Ivan came through.  She went back to her mobile home the next morning and Ivan had spawned a tornado - her mobile home and all her possessions were simply gone.  She had spent that morning looking through the debris in the fields near where she had lived, looking for clothes for her kids. It's a little hard to know what to say at that point.

But I'm back. I am very sorry that I have obligations around here and couldn't stay.  Even given that FEMA had barely any idea how to react to a disaster in real time, it was probably one of the most gratifying things I have ever done. Would I do it again? You bet!

Amos

copyright © 2004  John Amos KC6TVM

updated:  February 17, 2007