Hurricanes Helene (September 2024) made landfall as a Category 4 in Florida and made its’s way to Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. Helene’s high winds and flooding killed more than 230 people, making it the deadliest hurricane to strike the U.S. since Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017.
Hurricane Milton (October 2024) also made landfall in Florida and caused record flooding and devastation with the help of 37 tornado’s it brought with it. As of October 21, 2024, Hurricane Milton killed at least 35 people: 32 in the United States and three in Mexico. Preliminary damage estimates place the total cost of destruction from the storm at US$85 billion.
1,900 American Red Cross Responder’s are helping people across 35 shelters in the Southeast, living with the destruction from Hurricanes Milton and Helene.
I happen to be one of them. This is my 14 days of Disaster Relief Deployment with the Red Cross.
DAY 1: PDX TO TAMPA
When you sign up for volunteering and mark “able to deploy”, you have to be ready to leave with 24 hours notice at any given time. You have no idea when it will be.
For me, it was Wednesday, October 23rd at about 10am.
They don’t tell you anything. Nothing in training on what to expect. No one set of instructions with all relevant information.
You get random text messages and emails throughout the day of deployment. One will give you a phone number to set up your flight. Another message tells you that you should be getting a message about transportation from the airport (but not to the airport) sometime later that day, but if you don’t they recommend calling the provided number. Then you get an email with a 6 page attachment with deployment mission information you don’t understand. Then they inform you that you should get a text telling you your lodging within 2 hour of your plane landing. The I get another text, which is a group chat asking some other guy to reach out to me about picking up my Mission Card & vest (which leads to another text)… it’s a shit show.
Departing Flight PDX-LAX: 10/24/24 @ 5:30 pm
Connecting Flight LAX – Tampa, Florida: 10/25/24 @ 6:00 am
When I get off the plane I see this message:
Doesn’t tell me how I am to get to the hotel, nor do I understand why I’d need valet, so I call the numbers I was provided. No answer. I take an Uber.
My the time I get checked in it’s almost 9 am.
I run over to grab some of the breakfast buffet and as I’m scurrying out, am informed it’s not free. I paid $36 for a couple bites of egg and a donuts.
I take an hour and a half nap, shower, and head over to headquarters, per the text, thinking the front desk will know how I’m getting there. They didn’t. I take an Uber.
I sit and wait in a chair, 3 feet away from this woman, for 3 hours. She never even made eye contact. She did look me up and down one time though.
After 3 hours, she gives me an address where I’m going to be working then hands me a piece of paper to sign, apparently for a vehicle. When I hand it back, she looks at it, hands it back to me, then she sits back down and resumes ignoring me.
“Am I supposed to do something with this?”
“Yeah, take it to transportation”. Like I’m an idiot for not knowing that.
“Am I supposed to go to work?? And where is transportation?”
“Yes at 7. 7 to 7. And follow the signs.”
Okie doke.
I get another text telling me to go to base camp for lodging so I go their first.
The person who checks people in was gone so I was waiting in my car when I get another text saying that my lodging is at the Marriott again.
FML.
I head back to Marriott.
Apparently Taylor Swift or something was singing across the street from my hotel that day because it took [not exaggerating in the least] 1 hour to go a half block. I literally called the valet and was like, “I can see you, can you just come take my car??”. They couldn’t.
By the time I got rechecked in, it was like 4 pm. I had not slept at all the night before and now they want me to go work 12 hours and not sleep again??! I called them and they confirmed, “yes, we want you to find some meth from someone on the street and go to work”. So I did. Not the meth part…
I get to the shelter a half hour after the guy I will be working with (who is from PDX) and find out I’m the night supervisor [LMAO].
The woman working the day shift pulls me aside (see Facebook post here)…
We took turns and each got an hour nap on some wood furniture with SOS-pad blankets.
DAY 2:
I get off at about 7:30 am and make the 48 minute trip back to the Marriott – arriving about 2.5 hours before checkout. I want to shower and all that jazz and decide an hour nap is only going to make it worse, so I go to the pool before packing and checking out.
It takes me about 3 hours before I actually get to my pod at camp. Yes, my “pod”…
TBC…
A Single White Female 
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