Mitigation

Normally our team works in Disaster Survivor Assistance. We go door to door doing outreach, registering survivors, and doing case inquiries for those who have already registered.
Since Hurricane Sandy happened so long ago, the DSA stage of the disaster is over. The project we're working on is brand new for us. We're updating the flood database for the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and looking at homes that have had repetitive losses. In other words, we're going to the homes who've had more than one insurance claim for flooding (ex: they got hit by Irene and then again by Sandy) and we collect data on them and enter it into the database. The purpose is to figure out which of the homes are draining the money from the National Flood Insurance Program, and find out how we can mitigate - either raising the home or buying it out and turning the land into public space, not allowing anyone to build there because of the flood risk.

As far as what I actually do.....our days consist of either field work or office work. We go out into the field to inspect houses. We drive to our assigned areas and complete worksheets on each repetitive loss house, finding out what kind of foundation and structure it is, in what neighborhood, if it's elevated, etc. We gather all of this information from the street, and only talk to homeowners when they happen to be outside, so it's a lot less face-to-face interaction than we were used to in DSA. When we don't go out into the field, we're in the office entering the data that we collected from the inspections, looking up tax records, or plotting the homes on special maps to show what flood zone they're in.

At first I wasn't too thrilled about the work, but it turns out it's not so bad. Except for the heat wave when we first got here, the weather has been so much better than it was in our previous deployments, so I''m not dripping in sweat after 5 minutes in the field. We're also working in a neighborhood on the beach, so we get to see a lot of nice houses and sailboats docked right next to them. There are about four other FEMA Corps teams here as well, so the office environment is fun, and there's tons of people to hang out with when we have free time because we're all staying in the same hotel.

And I must admit, it is kind of nice to do some office work. I'm getting to brush up on excel, that's for sure. I was ridiculously proud of myself the other day for figuring out (all by myself!) how to make a spreadsheet that would add up the team's work stats for the week instead of me doing it manually! Oh the things I get excited about these days :/

One of the problems is that the crews are behind schedule (since we got kept longer in Oklahoma than they were planning) and now we have to work 10-hour days Monday through Friday. Between that and all our AmeriCorps duties, it doesn't leave a lot of time to enjoy the Big Apple. But that doesn't stop us from squeezing in some fun when we can. I'll post soon about all our exciting escapades in NYC.

Roadtrip!

Day 1: Denton, TX to Memphis, TN

The first day of the road trip included my first time every in the state of Arkansas, and a visit to the Little Rock Central High School, known for being a centerpoint in the fight for desegregation in the South.

We arrived to Memphis in the evening and had just enough time for a team dinner at the apparently world famous Gus's Fried Chicken, before heading back to the hotel and going to bed.

I hated the idea of being in Memphis, but not visiting Graceland so I found out on the handy-dandy internet that for one hour each morning, they open up the Meditation Gardens for free, and you can visit Elvis's and his family's graves.

Day 2: Memphis, TN to Lexington, KY

Luckily my team was not opposed to getting up a bit earlier, so we were able to make it to Graceland, much to my delight. I was a little stressed, because I thought a traffic jam was going to make us miss the hour-long window of free entrance, but we made it in time, because Ana drives like a boss. It wasn't very crowded at all. There were only a few other small groups, and one guy who had Elvis tattoos on every limb.

Since we were driving through Nashville anyways, we decided to stop for a few minutes and have a look around. We saw the Ryman Auditorium, walked around the downtown area (I have no idea where we were, I just know there were lots of bars and souvenir shops), and got back on the road.

Then we rolled on into Kentucky. I was surprised to find that Kentucky looked exactly as I imagined it. Picturesque green fields with white fences and horses grazing under oak trees. Or other kinds of trees. I can't pretend like I can tell the difference. We did nothing in Lexington besides get food from Walmart and sleep, so no exciting stories there.

Day 3 - Lexington, KY to Hagerstown, MD

Probably the most uneventful leg of the trip. We stopped in West Virginia.

That's all I got.

Day 4 - Hagerstown, MD to Melville, NY

We finally made it!!

Transition

Traditional AmeriCorps NCCC divides the 10-month service term into 4-6 different rounds. Each round concentrates on working with a different organization and the rounds are separated by a transition week at the base campus. Since FEMA Corps projects depend on something as unpredictable as natural disasters, it doesn't always run so smoothly for us.

The tentative plan was for us to transition in mid-June, but becasue they needed to keep us around a little longer in Oklahoma, about half the teams transitioned at the normal time in Denver, while the other half, my team included, transitioned a few weeks later in Denton, TX. We were bummed that we wouldn't be able to see a lot of our friends, but we were excited to be back in Denton to browse Recycled Bookstore, have a po' boy at Hoochie's, and drink a beergarita at Fuzzy's Tacos just one last time. Plus, what better state to spend the 4th of July in than Texas?

We got to stay at an amazing dorm at the University of North Texas, and after my roomate left mid-week to visit her family back home, I had a giant room all to myself. I realized that it was the first time in 5 months that I had had any substantial amount of time to myself. And, since they gave us a 4-day weekend, it was the first time in over 2 months that I had had over 2 days off (we only had one 2-day weekend in OK, and that was due to weather conditions). For those of you who know me, and know how I need my time to myself on a regular basis, you may be surprised that I haven't lost my mind by now. However, I haven't really had a problem with it. I think spending 4 months in Georgia with endless amounts of free time spent with people I could only communicate with on a 2-year-old level, I'm good on 'me-time' for a while. Once my roommate was gone, I found myself pacing the room, trying to figure out what to do with myself, before finally trying to go find someone to bother.

Transition week was useful. We did team debriefs where we got to learn about the other teams' experiences and got to share ours. We got to air our issues regarding the program with the people in charge, we had career workshops, and they even took us to a Rangers game!

On our free days we hung out in the square and lounged on the beach of Lake Lewisville. It was a good time. And then, too soon, it was time to pack up. It wasn't too hard to leave though, since our next stop was....

NEW YORK CITY!!

 

Well, Long Island, but still....

Oklahoma

It’s been quite a while since I updated my blog. I never posted the whole time we were in Oklahoma, which was a little over 5 weeks.

We arrived the day after the EF-5 went through Moore, 2 days after the tornadoes ripped through Shawnee, a city nearby. The destruction that we saw that first day, and continued to see throughout our time there was mindboggling. It went from houses that looked completely fine to piles of rubble on the next block.

The first night and the next day was spent at the mobile DRC which was set up in the parking lot of the First Baptist church in Moore. A small RV city had sprung up in that parking lot, with occupants from the Red Cross, Salvation Army, faith-based organizations, animal shelters, insurance companies, and state and local officials.

The first man that I registered had lost everything. He had just retired from the military and was describing to me matter-of-factly how the tornado had flattened his home. He had recently moved and hadn’t yet had time to buy an insurance policy. All of his personal possessions that remained could now fit in his truck, and for the time being, the truck was his new home. I gave him the addresses to shelters the Red Cross had set up, but he said he didn’t want to go to a shelter. He’d be fine. He had seen this kind of destruction in Afghanistan, he told me, but it was nothing like seeing it in his own town.

How do you do door to door outreach and registrations when there is nothing left standing in the neighborhood? This is what I was wondering as we first drove through the path of the tornado.

Most of the severely damaged areas were closed off to the public in the days immediately following the disaster. There were downed power lines, debris all over the road, and large objects like limbs and parts of houses that were positioned precariously on top of each other, ready to fall. After a few days, some of that had been taken care of, and the police and national guard let us in with our badges and were letting homeowners in with proof of residency.

At the beginning of the disaster, our efforts were concentrated on the hard hit areas. That meant we would walk around the areas and speak with the people sifting through the debris and trying to salvage what they could.

The idea of this seemed terrifying to me, just to walk up to someone who was standing on a pile of broken boards and muddy objects, now unable to tell if they were standing in their bedroom or living room, and interrupt what had to be an extremely difficult and emotional problems to tell them about FEMA assistance. I was unsure how they would react, and how I would react. This was so much bigger than West. I do not want you to misconstrue that and think that I am in any way diminishing what happened to the people in West. It was a terrible tragedy and for everyone affected and everyone who lost their home or their loved ones it is something that will affect them for the rest of their lives. What I’m trying to convey is that in West, you at least had some semblance of where you were. The street signs were standing, most walls were standing, you could look around and imagine what it looked like before. In Moore, you could have been anywhere. There was nothing recognizable. It’s what you would imagine the end of the world to be like. At the beginning I couldn’t even process it. It didn’t seem real. And even after more than a month, I still can’t really wrap my head around it.

So how do you talk to people that used to call this home? To be honest, I was shocked by it. People held themselves together incredibly well. Most wanted to tell us their stories. Where they were when it hit, what it sounded like, how their dog or cat made it through the storm, too. Many joked about it. They’d say things like “I always wanted skylights, just not this big,” or they’d spray paint the only wall left standing to say “For Sale – Newly Remodeled.” I don’t know how many times I heard survivors tell me “You gotta laugh about it, I guess, to keep from crying.”

It was also uplifting just to see the amount of people who poured into the area to offer help and the amount of supplies that had been donated.* Many survivors in the heavily damaged area joked that they were going to get fat because there were constantly trucks driving around offering hot meals, snacks, and cold drinks. There was an office set up at the community center where people could go in and offer help. Volunteers would figure out where their skills were needed and would send them out to help clean up debris or do other work. People affected by the tornadoes could sign up with this office if they needed help and volunteers would show up at their house to help them.

* (It is important to note here that money is always a useful donation, while donated clothes and other goods may go to waste. Talking to my friends in logistics, I found out that there had been so many clothes donated that they didn’t know what to do with them. There was a ton of bottled water, too, which is extremely important, but it got to a point where mountains of bottled water would be baking out in the sun for weeks. Trying to find a way to store and transport all of this stuff is a huge job. Money, on the other hand, is much more efficient and can be used to buy the kinds of things that can’t be donated, but that people still need.)

We got to see some familiar faces in Oklahoma. A few of the staff members from the Region VI office in Denton were there, and a few of the DSAT reservists that we had worked with in West got deployed here, too. In West, we had been the only FEMA Corps team, but in Oklahoma we were one of many. There were a lot of friends from the Denver campus that we got to see again, and there were also a lot of Sacramento teams that we got to know. It was great to see some new faces and hear about their experiences so far this round.

Oklahoma University was nice enough to open up their dorm rooms to us and to provide us with breakfast and supper every day. There were a lot of other volunteers staying in the dorms as well, from organizations like the Texas Conservation Corps and the AmeriCorps St. Louis Emergency Response Team. Almost all of the FEMA Corps teams were staying there with us, so it was a pretty great living situation.

Not trying to write a book here, so I’ll blog more about our deployment to Oklahoma soon…