When I check my email and see a video message from Brad Kieserman, national vice president of Disaster Operations and Logistics for the American Red Cross, I take particular notice. That’s because I’m a Red Cross volunteer who accepts two-week assignments to disasters around the country. Kieserman’s infrequent messages portend a significant need for help.
Kieserman was recruiting volunteers from throughout the country to help victims of this spring’s floods and tornados in the South and Ohio Valley. I looked at where help was needed and saw Evansville, Indiana, where I’m a native son, and which was my home until nearly five years ago. That’s when my wife Annette Gries and I moved to Tucson, Arizona. I saw a chance to help my former neighbors, some experiencing their worst day ever.
This would be my 17th deployment since joining the Red Cross four years ago. When you accept an assignment, you’re expected to leave within 24 hours. I was assigned on April 7 and on an airplane bound for Evansville the next day.
When I arrived in Evansville and navigated through the highway construction on U.S. 41 and the Lloyd Expressway to reach the Red Cross office on Stockwell Road, I found a busy Disaster Relief Operation headquarters. Besides Hoosiers, I met volunteers from California and Washington state to Pennsylvania and New York, Puerto Rico to Minnesota, and parts in between. We even had two volunteers from Hawaii, one with a name 49 letters long but thankfully shortened to five.
I usually take positions as a damage assessment supervisor, but I’ve helped in shelters, distributed rakes, shovels and cleanup kits to victims, fed from Red Cross emergency response vehicles, and handed out water, food, blankets and hygiene products from the back of a box truck. This time, I wanted to try a new activity we call fulfillment that delivers needed material to shelters.
On our first workday, my partner from Idaho and I filled orders from a shelter manager in Utica, which is a small river town near Jeffersonville, Indiana. But within days, shelters began closing, so our primary task became loading shelter trailers and delivering them to staging locations to be made ready for the next disaster.
My experience as a damage assessment supervisor surfaced, so I said so long to Evansville and was moved to Jeffersonville to help a team of volunteers, mostly new to damage assessment. Damage assessment stands between the event and financial assistance for those impacted, so we work as quickly as possible. With floods, though, we must wait for roads to clear. Once underway, we found flood-damaged homes along the Ohio River, of course, and significant damage along the East Fork of the White River from Shoals to Seymour. The river had reached well into the second level of one home, but residents there cleaning up seemed to take their situation in stride.
Red Crossers aren’t the only people helping. You’ll find neighbors, friends, strangers, members of church and community organizations, a host of other nonprofit organizations that provide food, tarps, muscle and sweat to help. It restores your faith in humankind.
The Red Cross is the best job I hate to have — hate because someone has to be in trouble for me to do it. The work feeds my heart, and I recommend it to anyone. To illustrate what I mean, I recall meeting a fellow Hoosier in a shelter for wildfire victims in Globe, Arizona. As we talked, he asked me if I could remember as a child how, when you were having a bad day, you wanted your mom and dad. It had been a while, I said, but I allowed that I could recall that feeling. He looked around at the other Red Cross volunteers and said, “Right now, you are our moms and dads.” For my first of two deployments to Hurricane Ian, I had a box truck with supplies at a multi-agency relief center and was standing at a table behind the truck. A young single mother walked up and looked at what I had. After I learned she and her daughter made up the household and asked what she might need, she responded, “Well, I’ve lost everything. I guess I need everything.” That hit me pretty hard.
Those moments are why we do what we do.
Evansville native and former Evansville Courier journalist and Toyota communications professional Patrick Wathen and his wife, Annette Gries, moved to Tucson, Arizona, in July 2020. Pat has been a Red Cross volunteer since April 2021.
Interested in being a Red Cross volunteer? Visit the organization’s website to learn more.
