Dispatches from Disaster

Two local volunteers, Julia Bishop and Linda Coordes, have responded recently to tornado-ravaged Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri. I asked them both some questions about what they learned and what they wanted to share with Cowlitz County citizens. I'll share their responses over the next few days.

I asked Linda what was the most frustrating aspect of the response.

The biggest frustration was waiting for the existing and/or responding infrastructure to become organized. It was easy to walk through the field and identify critical needs but difficult to wait for the supplies and man-power to respond. The scope of the disaster was so great and so wide-spread it took days to really understand where and how the response should be focused. This wasn’t because the leaders weren’t listening, it was simply a consequence of the damage to communication tools and destruction of existing emergency response equipment/resources. It was also incredibly difficult to express these difficulties to victims whose trauma and immediate needs far out-weighed their ability to logically comprehend the barriers sitting between them and the help they so desperately required.

I asked Julia the same question:

The biggest frustration that I ran into is that if the people had destroyed or major damage they got FEMA assistance otherwise there was little help. There was so much debris!!! They needed teams of people with chain saws and chippers to clean up all the downed trees and remove all the branches. There were many more trees that needed to come down. You had to always be aware of things still falling from trees.

The people there have been devastated over and over and the resources are depleted. Not many places that had much left to offer, as far as, free food and free clothing. Financially there was almost nothing left to offer them.

The people were very resilient and could not have accomplished as much as they did without the help of neighbors. They all were very good at looking out for each other and working together. We need to learn from that. The Mapping your neighborhood. I was mainly in real rural areas. If there is a blessing in a disaster it was the fact that it hit mainly rural areas in Mississippi. Not as much loss that way, but the people were hard to find.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow!