Juggling Help On Two Storm Fronts
The American Red Cross is stretched thin as it prepares for Hurricane Rita while it continues to offer assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina.
But,
spokesperson Carol Yelverton, "The good news is, we're resilient, we can take this stretching. It's interesting for us; it's causing us to think through how we take care of people. But as much as we are doing and feeding and sheltering people in the Gulf states, as people come throughout the country and walk into our chapters, we're helping them as much as we work with our evacuees, as much as we're connecting families through our Family Links Registry, we will also be present for people who need our help in the face of Hurricane Rita."Yelverton tells The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler that Texas has put together a comprehensive emergency management plan and is moving people into what they call hubs, where the Red Cross will be present.
"For instance," she says, "the folks who have been evacuating out of Galveston, the masses of folks, they're going to Huntsville, to hubs. There'll be Red Cross shelters there, among other shelters. We'll be feeding people, we'll be making sure they have a safe place to stay and have necessities, and also that they have a friendly face, somebody who they can kind of decompress with because this is yet another extraordinary experience."
The Red Cross learned a few things from Katrina.
"We did a lot of things really, really well, in terms of the hundreds of thousands of people that we sheltered, the incredible amounts of meals that we served," Yelverton says. "I think what we have learned is that we should continue on in our process, not only of doing that hands-on work every day, where you can't think because you're so busy getting meals out, but also at kind of a different level, thinking out loud, being thoughtful about how we approach the service that we offer to people in a time of need, given the size and scope of something we've never dealt with. We're a transparent organization. We think out loud. We understand that, although we provide immediate emergency relief, this is going to take longer than we normally would. And so we're really looking to, 'How do we do this in the best possible way?' "
Yelverton stresses that the Red Cross is primarily a volunteer organization.
"We're made up of people like you and me," she says. "I'm a staff member, but many people who just kind of say, 'I can take two weeks out of my life right now and go down to Texas or get trained, and I'll help people.' We have people who have been volunteering with us for years and people who are calling us in the last three weeks. We've had thousands and thousands of people call us and say, 'I need to be a part of it.' So it's very interesting to watch this process."