In the world of long-term hurricane response, George Hernandez Mejia’s advance team seems extraordinarily young. At 28, Hernandez is the old man on the All Hands and Hearts crew now laying groundwork for the nonprofit’s response to Hurricane Laura. The seven people with him on the Texas border, headed for Louisiana, average around 24.
Rebuilding after a disaster often relies heavily on volunteers over 55, says Michelle Meyer, director of Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. Younger crews often swoop in for a week or a weekend, but it’s usually older people who direct them.
Retirees, after all, have the flexibility and disposable income that makes it possible to volunteer for a year or more away from home. Often, a construction retiree will move to a stricken area, maybe living out of an RV, to oversee a nonprofit’s rebuilding projects.
COVID-19, though, has changed that dynamic. Doctors would generally recommend that anyone over 60, particularly with an underlying condition, avoid traveling to disaster areas, where hygiene can be spotty. Even in places where COVID-19 rates had been low, the chaos that follows a hurricane could cause a spike. And where COVID levels were already high — as when Hurricane Hanna struck the Rio Grande Valley in July — the danger seems even greater.
That makes crews like Hernandez’s more important than ever. Says Meyer, “It’s time for young people to step up.”
More Information
How you can help
All Hands and Hearts: allhandsandhearts.org
Orange County Disaster Rebuild: ocdisasterrebuild.com
‘Thousands of unmet needs’
In the best of times, rebuilding a hard-hit community takes years. Now COVID-19 makes it even harder.
“We’re used to seeing so many more boots on the ground,” lamented Michelle Stubblefield, of Orange County Disaster Rebuild.
National outfits such as FEMA and the Red Cross are stretched thin, and many philanthropic organizations are flat broke. Physical distancing means that work crews have to be smaller, and that volunteers can’t be crammed together, summer-camp-style, overnight. Travel restrictions make it hard for out-of-state volunteers to come and go.
MORE FROM LISA GRAY: 'This is what we live for': CrowdSource Rescue mobilizes ahead of Hurricane Laura
Across the U.S., many communities are struggling with the long-term aftermath of natural disasters: not just hurricanes, but also wildfires, tornadoes and floods. But in the last few years, Texas’ and Louisiana’s Gulf Coast has been particularly hard-hit.
Stubblefield, in Orange County, knows this all too well. Just north of Port Arthur on Texas’ Gulf Coast, the county has been slammed by three disasters in four years. In 2017, she says, Harvey flooding affected 85 percent of Orange County. In 2019, floods from Tropical Storm Imelda did heavy damage to the county’s west side. Now Hurricane Laura has walloped “the whole east side.”
“Our little community is struggling,” Stubblefield said. “We still need help with damage from Harvey and Imelda. We still have people living in 12 FEMA trailers from Harvey.”
And now they’re dealing with Hurricane Laura. Thursday morning, Stubblefield’s group moved a single mother and her children into a donated RV.
When Hurricane Laura blew ashore on August 27, Stubblefield said, it split the family’s trailer “in half.” The woman and her kids barely survived. And with nowhere else to go, they’d been staying in the broken trailer, without power, for a week.
The RV was only a temporary fix — the family still needed somewhere to live long-term —but at least it was something.
“We have thousands of unmet needs,” Stubblefield said. She sounded exhausted.
Volunteers needed
Friday morning Hernandez and the All Hands and Hearts advance team that he supervises were doing chainsaw work, clearing Hurricane Laura debris in East Texas. He asked that I not be any more specific about their temporary location: The chainsaw work was just something useful to do while the team awaited word from Louisiana, where Laura had wreaked even more havoc, and where All Hands and Hearts planned to set up headquarters. East Texas, as badly damaged as it was, wasn’t their ultimate destination, and Hernandez didn’t want to disappoint anyone.
MORE FROM LISA GRAY: 31 ways to fight despair: Protest murals. Secret acts of kindness. And homegrown tomatoes.
All Hands and Hearts welcomes volunteers of all ages, but even before COVID, it skewed younger than many of the disaster-recovery groups it works alongside. Religious or veterans’ organizations, for instance, tend to draw volunteers who are well past college age. But also, All Hands and Hearts actively recruits people who aren’t already skilled. “We teach people to do stuff,” Hernandez said.
Pre-COVID-19, All Hands was also extremely flexible about volunteer commitments, he said — a flexibility that appeals to younger people. A volunteer could work on a site for as little as one day, provided they could get themselves to and from the place.
But COVID makes such flexibility extremely hard. To reduce travel hassles, quarantining, and the likelihood of an outbreak, the group is now recruiting volunteers to serve for 12 weeks at a time — and offering them paid flights, meals, accommodations and a small stipend to do so.
The need, Hernandez said, is greater than ever. But he worried that people don’t realize that. Usually, he said, a disaster the size of Laura would generate more media attention, which in turn would bring more volunteers. But Laura, he thinks, got lost among all the other news pummeling Americans this year — the presidential election, the calls for racial justice, the economy.
And, most of all, COVID. COVID makes even a disaster worse.
Hernandez is hoping for volunteers to make it better.
lisa.gray@chron.com
The Link LonkSeptember 05, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/Older-volunteers-a-mainstay-in-hurricane-15544213.php
Older volunteers, a mainstay in hurricane rebuilding, are hard to find in a pandemic that puts them at risk - Houston Chronicle
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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