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…