First night at a Red Cross shelter

Last night was a unique and powerful experience.  In many ways it was similar to other sheltering missions I have worked before.  In many ways it was similar to other house-fires I have responded to before.  In many ways it was similar to working the Hurricane Dorian DRO.  But it was still a unique experience.

I was 45 minutes late when I arrived (something I had approved before agreeing on the shift).  After introductions, I was assigned to assist someone who had just arrived on a flight to find his home gone.  This too was similar to other disasters when the owners were out-of-town.  We went through the paperwork and got him set up with a cot for the night.

I then found a group of parents who couldn't sleep, so we played a game of Rummy.  Apparently there are many variants to Rummy because there were some crazy rules I had never heard of before.  Was quite fun, even though it made me look like a total idiot.

Periodically, we would do a walk-through the shelter.  In my past sheltering experience the most the shelter ever supported was 6 families.  That pales in consideration of the 150 people who were sleeping that night.

One of the walk-troughs I was given a tour (in-case I needed to help someone in the shift).  The kitchens, bathrooms, medical spaces ... all pretty much what I expected.  Then I was shown a small classroom with trash bags of stuff in neat rows.  I figured this was the items each of the evacuees had on their person when they escaped the building, turned out to be all the recoverable possessions for everyone sleeping in the room behind me.

It became very hard to keep my composure at that point.  There was a time in my life, when all my possessions would have easily filled this small classroom (if bagged up the same way), but the 150 people behind me COMBINED didn't even half-fill the room.  Reality crashed down on me fairly hard.

Things were pretty quiet until it was time to get breakfast ready.  Some early risers and I sat at a table and chatted.  I heard detailed accounts of where they were when the alarms went off, and what it was like.  I told the story about a simulated rescue I participated in with the Lake Elmore Volunteer Fire Department.  The story seemed to convince them that I really understood what it was like, and we kept going for well over an hour.

Then the morning staff arrived, people started to wake, and things picked up rapidly.  The tranquil environment became a buzz of activities.  I was asked to help set-up a printer, a laptop, get forms printed, and demo how to use the printer.  I used my personal laptop to download the forms that I thought they would need, and loaded them onto a thumb-drive so the forms could be printed as-needed when I left.

The entire process should have only taken a few minutes, but there was so many small problems to fix, and I was the only person in the security desk (which we used as check-in point for the shelter), that it was 3 hours after I was scheduled to go home that I finally left.  I would have stayed longer, but many pointed out that I would be more valuable rested and back tonight.