Just a huge thank you to all the volunteers that are engaged across the county in the unprecedented year of natural disasters. The partner of the year who has done the most for their people is the State of Louisiana.  They have been in the bullseye three times, and have been a great Disaster Response partner.  Really care, and have stepped up to every disaster client need.

As we begin Thanksgiving week I thought I would give you an update.  Operations last a lot longer than the attention span of media. 

I don’t think many of us will miss 2020 with nostalgia.  And it is not over yet.  We are still reeling from Hurricanes, Floods, and Wildfires.  Today as I write this there are 38 active Red Cross National Disaster Operations:

    Continental US active Disaster Relief Efforts in progress

Closer to home and looking at Louisiana Hurricanes we are 94 days since we started this Disaster Relief Effort

We still have in Hotel Shelters:

Laura      1,900
Delta        154
Zeta          35

So more that 2,000 evacuees are still in Hotel shelters.  That number gets smaller daily as repairs are made or FEMA solutions for housing are available. 

     Sorry for the eye chart.  Each "H" is a Hotel Shelter.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem these are the Major and Destroyed homes from our Damage assessment teams:

Laura     12,244
Delta       1648
Zeta         537

      Damage assessment map HUR Laura Louisiana

And an additional 700 Major Damage and Destroyed Homes in Far East TX.

    Damage Chart HUR Laura Far East TX

This is one of the areas that Federal, state, and local Government as well as other charities rely on the Red Cross for this specific damage by address information.  To gather this info Red Cross disaster assessment teams visited more than 70,000 dwellings.

Supporting these clients we have 118 trained Red Cross disaster workers on the job.  There are an additional 20 folks that are in transit for Thanksgiving week.  Most rotations are two weeks.  This includes Mass Care, Recovery, Health, Mental Health, spiritual care, and logistics personnel.

On a personal note I did one more rotation on a disaster assignment, but was released Friday 11/20 (Yeah!).  So I am looking forward to Thanksgiving with close family. 

National Exercise

Thank you for all that participated in the National ARES / Red Cross EMCOMM exercise November 14.  We are still collecting the data, and I promise a read out when all the Division Clearing Houses report.  So just some headlines:

•         47 States and 3 territories participated
•         Literally thousands of messages
•         With just a partial mapping of divisions that have reported so far:

 

Have a great Thanksgiving week!

Kevin @KF5FUZ