When social worker Roberta Johnson of Deer Isle responded to an e-mail from the National Association of Social Workers asking for Red Cross emergency volunteers, she had no idea what she was getting into. She remembered thinking that because she worked in a school with summers off she could help in the summertime if she were called up.
Johnson, 48, an island Greenlaw married to Stonington Harbormaster and Commercial Fish Pier manager Stephen Johnson and with a high-school-age son, hadn’t considered having to leave her family and her work to help with an emergency, but that was before Katrina.
The Red Cross called on Friday afternoon, Sept. 30, to ask if she would be willing to leave for the hurricane area in 24 to 48 hours. “I checked it over with Stephen and the school principal, who were both really supportive,” she said. She agreed to leave on Monday morning and with that, started on what turned out to be an exhausting and horrifying but insightful and rewarding 14 days. The experience is so intense, she said, people can burn out in just two to three weeks.
The Red Cross followed up its call with an e-mail filled with directions, the travel agency to contact (the Red Cross paid for Johnson’s ticket and gave her $500 for food). She called a toll-free number at 3 p.m. each day for a conference call, did on-line training, got an overview of what the Red Cross does and learned what to bring and what not to bring. Because she was told she could be in extreme conditions, she got a hepatitis B shot. She’d already had one for tetanus.
President Bush said he wanted shelters closed by Oct. 15, so Johnson’s team went to five or six of them helping the staff find placement for evacuees. At those shelters, she said, “I witnessed the different stages of acceptance of what had happened to them.” First, she said, was shock: “They were realizing their houses and neighborhoods and in some cases their whole towns were gone.” The question was what to do – go back or go someplace else – and there wasn’t much time to think about it. If they do go back, she said, “I think they may find it so hard, they may not stay there, but I also think that it’s very important that they try – you need to see it for yourself.”
She said most of the people she dealt with came from Bay St. Louis, near Gulfport, which got a 35-foot storm surge.
One fairly young nurse burned out at the end of a three-week tour, then Hurricane Rita struck along with a tornado alert, and she had to evacuate the shelter she was working at. Many of the evacuees spoke only Spanish. The nurse and other staff members had to get the evacuees out of bed, into buses and to a tornado shelter. “She was just fried,” Johnson said of the nurse. “She was tired, stressed out, dark circles under her eyes, venting, very worried about the evacuees and what would happen to them. She talked about wanting to stay. She didn’t know when to let go. “They need me,” she said. So a lot of what we did was counseling and debriefing the staff, helping them to realize it was time to leave for them and for the evacuees, putting everything into perspective.”
Johnson said she hadn’t realized how massive the Red Cross organization is and equated organizing disaster relief for Katrina to organizing a small corporation in five weeks. The Red Cross used an abandoned K-Mart building for its headquarters and called it Camp K-Mart. “You drove in and saw hundreds of budget rental trucks. Inside were hundreds of people, computers, wiring…” The Red Cross provides shelter, mass care, mental health, client services (people who give out money), and resources. “It was a beehive of action to coordinate services for those three states [Mississippi, Alabama and Florida]. There were piles and piles of clothes. They need housing. They need to be hooked up with water.”
One experienced Red Cross worker, Arlene Allen, 79, of Sarasota, Forida, inspired Johnson, who called Allen and some others she met on her tour “truly remarkable.” Allen was trying to get some money for one particular evacuee, Johnson recalled, but was told there was no check-writing machine. So Allen went where the machine was supposed to be. No one answered the door, so Allen stayed, knocking at the door until someone let her in. She then demanded the machine and did not leave until she got it. On the other hand, Johnson also met some workers who had what she referred to as a hero complex. “They wanted the accolades,” she said, explaining, “When you work in human services, the work you do goes unnoticed.” Most people understand, she said, but others have visions of going in and saving people. “They wanted acclaim and they got it, but some decisions were not in the best interest of the evacuees.” Johnson said it was, “I know best” and “Let me take care of you.”
In those 14 days helping the hurricane evacuees, Johnson said, every day had its trauma story.
An older New Orleans couple decided to go back to their damaged, but not destroyed house. The husband was a diabetic and in a wheelchair, the wife also had medical problems. They’d had to make too many decisions and were worn out. Johnson said she felt good about being able to get them some money to spend the night in a motel, away from the crowds and noise.
Another family with 18 adult children thought they’d be all right on the 13th floor of a hotel until a 12th floor window exploded. The back draft of the hurricane ripped the sheets off the bed and blew the mattress off, too. It almost blew the people out the window. Tiles were flying off the bathroom wall. They somehow managed to get into a stairwell and were saved.
Yet another family got out of their house with their two little dogs and made it up a tree. Seven people clung to that tree for four and a half hours fighting 165 mph. gusts. One dog got frantic and started clawing at the wife’s neck, so she took off her bra and wrapped it around the dog like a harness. Her husband said he’d done two stints in Vietnam as a sniper, but never went through anything like Katrina.
Johnson couldn’t get over the generosity of the Mississippi people. They brought big plastic storage containers filled with toothbrushes, food, and clothes. Church ladies took turns cooking food for the people in the shelter. Numbers had peaked between 500 and 600, but when the shelters were beginning to close, numbers dropped to between 150 and 200.
As Johnson talked about her experiences with the hurricane victims, her husband and teenaged son helped themselves to generous slices of an apple pie she had just made, commenting on how good it tasted. She replied, “I’m lucky to have a kitchen to bake a pie in.” Then she said, “The people in the Gulf area are going to need help for a long time. I just hope we don’t forget them.”