Update of Sandy Disaster Relief Effort:

November 20, 2012, 01:25:44 pm

As many of you are aware I have volunteered with the American Red Cross since I retired. I have some visibility into how things are going both from the fact that the national warehouse is here in Austin TX, and from the volunteers returning to Texas, and those that are still on the front lines who I am speaking with daily. I thought I would take just a minute and give you all an update of what I know.

The national warehouse looks a little bit like Mother Hubbard's Cupboard at the moment - I do not remember a response of this size in several years. It takes a lot of communication and networking gear to coordinate a response of this magnitude -

6000 volunteers,
a fleet of 350 Emergency Response Vehicles,
50 partners with another 2000 volunteers,
17 shelters still open,
about as many field kitchens.

To date Red Cross has:

served more than 6 million meals, and
distributed around 3 million bulk items (for example clean up kits),
had 70,000 health & mental health appointments

We are at around $50 million dollars spent on the response already.

Going into this holiday weekend we have about 700 volunteer positions open. This is a tough time to recruit folks, but we are doing our best.

I had the opportunity to speak yesterday to Rowland - one of our Central Texas Red Cross volunteers who has just returned from DR Sandy. Normally deployments are from 2-3 weeks. Rowland is in Disaster Services Technology - but is also an Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) Driver, and his route took him delivering meals and recovery items (shovels, gloves, clean up kits...) in a large circle in New Jersey.

Due to the degree of damage, and the number of folks impacted, I imagine this will be an ongoing effort for quite some time.

Kevin (Real) McCoy [KF5FUZ]
("Roscoe Ventura" Jayco Seneca HD SS 34 Diesel 2006; "Toad" Jeep Wrangler Unlimited 2007)