With a disaster the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina, few families remain unscathed, even among those of us looking at pictures of the misery and squalor from the high-and-dry comfort of Colorado.
The Red Cross has been overwhelmed with calls from people trying to locate family members and friends displaced by the hurricane. The callers are desperate for information, and there are few options beyond pestering the exhausted volunteers answering the phones at relief agencies.
But they can’t offer much help.
“I know it’s easy for me to say,” said Robert Thompson, communications director for the Mile High Chapter of the American Red Cross, “but everyone has to try to be patient.”
Thousands of relief workers are in shelters and mobile food kitchens in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, and whenever people arrive seeking help, they are given the chance to use phones to call relatives, he explained.
That’s everyone’s best hope for connecting.
But waiting is excruciating.
The first word my family got from my niece, who was evacuated from Slidell, La., before the hurricane struck, came at 2 a.m. Wednesday. She was calling from Hattiesburg, Miss. Needless to say, it was a difficult two days with no information about her.
Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes, belongings and whole communities. The Red Cross, The Salvation Army and other agencies have mobilized to provide shelter, drinking water, food, clothing and medicine in areas where there is no electrical power and where transportation is a mess.
Thompson said Hurricane Katrina is “the single largest domestic national disaster response in American Red Cross history, and the most useful thing anybody can do right now is to give money to the Red Cross, The Salvation Army or other relief agencies.”
Collecting food, clothing or other stuff to ship to the victims is less helpful because getting it into the area is expensive and the needs are often very specific.
“Bless people’s hearts, when the tsunami hit last winter, they were donating parkas and winter clothes,” said Thompson, “but they were just not useful.”
The relief agencies prefer to buy the items as close to the relief area as possible. Necessities get in the hands of the victims more quickly and “the money spent in that area also helps buoy the local economy, which has taken a huge hit,” he explained.
To pay for the Hurricane Katrina relief, the Red Cross is working to raise $130 million.
Denver has been extraordinarily generous in the past, Thompson said. After the tsunami, the Mile High Chapter was one of the top fundraisers nationwide.
“We are being inundated with requests from organizations willing to raise funds on behalf of the Red Cross,” he said.
One drive launched in Denver on Wednesday morning raised over $60,000 by noon.
More than 1,000 people have volunteered to work the phone banks at the Red Cross as well, and 12 volunteers accompanied local staff workers to the disaster area to work in direct relief to victims.
“It’s wonderful,” Thompson said.
The federal government, insurance companies, churches and a wide range of nonprofit organizations are pumping money into the disaster area.
But at a time when rugged independence and personal responsibility are practically a mantra in this country, millions more in assistance is still needed.
It’s a lesson that none of us is immune from the risk of a devastating illness, accident or natural disaster.
The specter of hardship and loss along the Gulf Coast is a heartbreaking reminder of just how much red-staters, blue-staters – all of us – really depend on each other.
For information about the Red Cross disaster relief effort, go to www.redcross.org.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
