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Media Advisory:  Sept 25, 2005
Further information: John Stein, NOVA Director of Public Affairs
For Immediate Release
john@trynova.org, 503-554-1552, fax 503-554-1532

Alexandria, Virginia
Sunday evening, September 25

This is being written during a terrible lull. It is a moment when NOVA’s National Crisis Response Team members are poised to go back toward the Gulf Coast from which they were evacuated two days ago in advance of Hurricane Rita. Those responders find themselves among a displaced army of relief workers, many not certain where they will be assigned, and some knowing that the place where they were working last week, such as a shelter for Katrina evacuees in Beaumont, Texas, might well be under water just now and, for certain, may not be functioning anytime soon.

In some respects, this may be a particularly good time to report to our public. In place of providing a linear narrative – an impossibility just now – a set of summary reports may give NOVA’s members and supporters at least a snapshot of the work here and there over the past three weeks.

By way of overview, all those who have served to date have driven to their assigned place – the availability of personal transportation is essential, given the frequent need to move. While NOVA has deployed at least 75 responders to sites in Mississippi and Louisiana, hundreds of their CRT-trained colleagues have helped to staff the shelters across the U.S. Texas gave refuge to hundreds of thousands of Katrina evacuees – before millions of Texans themselves had to flee their homes. Up till then, Texas CRT team members had been vital participants in the caring services offered in programs in Beaumont, Waco, Houston, Alvin, and in very substantial numbers, San Antonio. In another example, Arkansas alone has taken in about 70,000 evacuees, and its dozens of shelters have had the service of the Arkansas CRT. Those hundreds of shelter-based crisis responders (like those previously reported on at the shelter in Denver) will get their recognition in due course. For now, it is worth noting that most of these people get to go home after 12-hour shifts of service. Meanwhile, here’s some catch-up reporting on crisis responders much closer to the scene of the hurricanes’ devastation. For a great many of them, a place to sleep is in their tents or cars, except for the more fortunate ones sharing shelter space in buildings with electricity and air conditioning.

Mississippi
Among the first teams to start helping victims and first responders were those drawn from Florida’s Crisis Response Team (FCRT). An exploratory group, working with the state’s department of health, was mentioned in an earlier report. These were followed by three teams from Arkansas, which were covering four of FEMA’s Disaster Recovery Centers.

Additional South Carolinians, supplemented by Arkansans and Ohio volunteers, have been working in the Salvation Army’s “Compassion Care Center” and community canteens where local survivors who are camping out at their homes can come get food, showers and other help. One of these is an arena in Biloxi now fondly named “Yanki Stadium” in tribute to the Northerners who have come to help. Some of these services are actually canteens on wheels, staffed by Salvation Army and NOVA responders, bringing food, water, and compassion to those camping out some distance from the fixed facilities.

A separate effort was put in place when the state asked colleagues at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to set up a “decampment center” in Pascagoula, near the Alabama border. There, hundreds of first responders brought in to help their Mississippi colleagues are sent for two days of decontamination (literally), tactical debriefing, and decompression before returning home. The last task has been organized by FDLE Detective Terry Thomas, the department’s most experienced crisis responder. CRT team members hold private sessions with the law enforcement officers, EMTs, and firefighters, most of who had been exposed to traumatic sights and sounds.

The first team was very well received, so a second team relieved them, then a third. Likewise, the decampment model itself has proved a success, so when a second one was set up at a nearby Lockheed-Martin facility, a CRT team was made an integral part of that operation. A more recent decampment center for US Forestry Services employees in Fort Smith, Arkansas, greatly valued their CRT colleagues.

Louisiana
In contrast with Mississippi, Louisiana initially did not request help from voluntary agencies like NOVA or counterpart agencies in other states. In recognition of the brutal hit experienced by the state, NOVA sent what might be called a “scouting party” there in the person of Chaplain Bobby Smith, head of TX CRT, to make contacts in his neighboring state, even as his Texas colleagues began providing emotional first aid to the hundreds of thousands relocating to Texas.

Formal invitations faxed or emailed from officials – always a strict requirement to get a NOVA team – were not always available or needed. When the disaster mortuary call center asked if a Texas team could help staff the calls coming from desperate New Orleanians, a team was sent to that Baton Rouge facility to answer that need. NOVA is meeting another request – to help the Salvation Army staff the same disaster mortuary with a few of our board-certified chaplains. Virtually all of these teamwork services derive from the many phone calls between Cheryl Tyiska, NOVA disaster coordinator, and her counterpart at the Salvation Army, Kevin Ellers.

No Oklahoma NOVA team existed until Chaplain Danny Lynchard in Tulsa put calls into all the Oklahomans known to have completed the CRT training. Within a day of those calls, a team of six or eight was en route to FEMA’s Disaster Recovery Center in Baton Rouge, and later worked with churches and with other local agencies. At the moment when those and other agencies shut down temporarily in anticipation of Hurricane Rita, Danny had made good connections with at least 15 local programs who had put in requests for CRT help. A larger team from Indiana was on its way to help with these requests when Rita made them, too, hole up for a time. That team did some work in LA but got deflected back to the DRCs in Mississippi. Similarly, the team in the donated RV from Wayne County, Pennsylvania, whose three volunteers were nearing their assignment to serve as a NOVA “operations center” in Biloxi, Mississippi, was stopped mid-way to await new orders, and a likely new assignment.

In conclusion
The sense of uncertainty, shifting assignments, and the lack of a local “boss,” like FEMA’s DRC directors to whom the NOVA teams reported during last year’s Florida hurricanes, at many of the places where CRT teams are operating in both Mississippi and Louisiana, accurately reflects the unsettled circumstances of their jobs. One of the mantras in the CRT training – be prepared to be flexible, and do what needs to be done – has never been so much the watchword in any of the previous national deployments. The work keeps demanding creativity – how do we help our fellow relief workers and evacuees at one of the many “spontaneous shelters” set up in churches with no access to food and water? How do we manage phone calls from panic-stricken citizens wanting to know if any of the recovered corpses is that of a missing loved one?

The work is hard and essential and rewarding. Those on the ground are not surprised to hear this bleak, general message FEMA is giving to the various relief agencies: be prepared to serve the survivors of Katrina and Rita over the next year.

Coping With Hurricane Katrina & Rita:
For those who have an immediate involvement with people who have been killed or injured, the following may be useful:

NOVA's Hurricane Katrina & Rita Response & Information: