I want to share a little of my experience in the Red Cross response to the tornadoes in Alabama on April 27th.
The Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) assigned to our Chapter* came back from Eastern North Carolina on Sunday morning, May 1st, and I was asked if I wanted to take it to Alabama for the response to the tornadoes. My co-driver** and I rolled out of Asheville Monday morning arriving at the Disaster Relief Operation HQ in Birmingham Monday afternoon. Tuesday was spent in orientation, loading the ERV with snacks and beverages, and getting out to Tuscaloosa to meet our boss and set up an Emergency Assistance Station.
An Emergency Assistance Station is typically a box truck with bulk distribution supplies (rakes, shovels, gloves, tarps, clean-up kits, etc.), an ERV to canteen clients and to take supplies out into affected neighborhoods, and a health and/or mental health team. We set up east of Tuscaloosa off of Hwy 216. For the first several days, helicopters were flying search patterns north of 216, and the National Guard turned out in force that first weekend for search and recovery operations in the woods to our north.
It’s hard to describe tornado damage to someone who hasn’t seen it, and most of us haven’t seen an EF5 tornado’s work. I remember seeing an uncle’s barn go when I was about six, but that was in Iowa. Here there were home foundations sucked clean of everything and woods with all the treetops twisted off eight to twelve feet off the deck. There was lesser damage, of course, at the edges of the tornado path, but there was a mile-wide swath of virtually complete devastation. I thought of the aftermath of a sustained artillery barrage but without craters and without any sense of directionality; everything was just thrown everywhere.
There was collateral damage. There were a bunch of displaced pets. A displaced yellow lab was struck by a car on 216 on our first morning there, breaking her back at the hips and causing internal hemorrhage. A nurse on her way home from work and I sat with her and kept her comfortable as her gums turned from pink to pale to white.***
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Anyway, it was good work; pretty heavy manual work getting material from the pallets on the box truck onto the ERV or directly into the hands of clients who found us. We went to bed legitimately tired every night. I got to come home the other day after two weeks, and they’re going to be working out there for quite awhile. The ERV is on it’s way to the Mississippi with a new crew.
*Emergency Response Vehicles are national assets assigned to a custodial chapter.
**ERVs require two drivers for travel. We’re supposed to switch off every two hours to avoid fatigue. There are also daily drive time and distance restrictions, but they didn’t apply here.
***The dog was a real sweetheart throughout. She’d had a pretty good couple of days with local folks feeding and looking out for her, and I choose to believe that dogs such as her go to heaven or the happiest possible rebirth or whatever.
