So all that whining in this journal about not being worked hard enough payed off. The gods heard me and gave me stuff to do. So the next day I went to the Hard Rock shelter and yes, it was an inappropriate place for a shelter being attached to a huge casino. I wound up getting in 25k steps in loading and carting peoples stuff down through the casino to buses. It was chaos. On my first run I was stopped by some guy I don’t remember if he was…
Read MoreDay: October 30, 2024
Red Cross Needs Slack Servers and Internal Communication Overhaul
Sunday Oct 20 AgainNow it’s 10PM and I’m back in my hotel room. Plans have changed again. I stayed up til breakfast then slept til almost 5PM and then got a call telling me that I’m no longer on night shifts and I’m no longer assigned to the Mega-Shelter. Now I’m going to a shelter at a Hard Rock Cafe and casino. I thought that shelter was shutting down because an operating casino is not an appropriate place to be sheltering families. They must need me to help shut it…
Read MoreStaying up All Night for Mega-Shelter Night shift (that won’t happen)
Sunday October 20It’s 3:15 AM and now I’m sitting in the lobby of a different hotel trying to stay up until 5AM to prepare myself for the midnight shifts that I signed up to handle at the new “mega-shelter” which apparently is a big deal because it’s bigger and more comfortable than the vast majority of shelters that Red Cross has done in the past. I visited and did a walkthrough earlier this evening as many of their crew were finishing up their last shift. It’s in this giant empty…
Read MoreEmotion packed day in Florida shelter
Thursday October 17 2024Today was an emotion packed day and almost entirely negative emotion. Well, maybe not entirely.I finally started doing things for Red Cross. Went to a couple shelters and yes they do exist they aren’t some kind of hoax and did shelter transition triage (SRT) basically asking the clients a series of questions to gauge their situation. They told me a lot of stories. That’s a big part of our job is just to listen to their stories, many of which have nothing to do with the disaster–well…
Read MoreFirst Day At Adventure Island Basecamp
Wednesday Oct 16Now I’m sitting on a surprisingly comfortable cot in a giant tent in the parking lot of whatever water park–Adventure Island– is across the street from Busch Gardens in Tampa Florida. So I got to Miami Friday evening then saturday a couple hundred of us Red Cross volunteers met in a ballroom and basically just got signed in and then they sent us out to wait. They gave us hotel rooms at this place right by the airport, the Marriott. I did have a roommate for the first…
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