Red Cross responds to Katrina in ways both large and small

MOUNT HERMON, LA. If ever a region needed a grassroots effort to meet the primitive needs of food, water and shelter, it is southeastern Louisiana. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross responded in ways big and small.

The organization is massive and, as one staffer put it, like a "well-oiled wheel" that's been through enough disasters to know what to do. But it also must rely on old-fashioned kindness and word of mouth to ensure those in need get help.

The kindness most often comes from experience. American Red Cross volunteers Glen and Martha Taylor, for instance, spent the weekend driving from their home in Duncan to Orange, Texas, where they waited as Katrina zeroed in on the low-lying Gulf Coast and took a swing east before making landfall early Monday.

On Tuesday, as news worsened from hard-hit New Orleans and displaced residents resigned themselves to great property losses and potentially long stays at outlying schools and churches, Taylor and several other Oklahomans, along with hundreds of volunteers, moved into a makeshift headquarters in Baton Rouge. They then were assigned to head east to Mount Hermon, a tiny town about 100 miles north of New Orleans near the Mississippi border.

Handing out assignments was Norman resident Linda Srnsky, a veteran volunteer who paired incoming helpers with the region's requirements, all while operating from an electrical workers' union hall without electricity or telephones.

"I do a little bit of everything," Srnsky said. "I've worked fires, bombings. Oklahoma City and New York."

With a disaster vehicle filled with 420 "heated meals," sweet and salty snacks and a pallet of bottled water, the Taylors began their journey down two-lane backroads that are now mazes of fallen forests, with thick, mature trees across roadways but sawed in half to allow passage and downed powerlines.

Early reports said the area avoided a direct hit. But as Tuesday wore on, news of residents still stranded on rooftops, of broken levees and bodies floating along New Orleans' famous streets drove home the worst for residents in nearby shelters and hotels.

New Orleans has no power. No sanitation. No running water. No stores for provisions. With each hour, water levels rose, until 80 percent of the city was immersed. Most news from the Big Easy came from a single radio station that reported hospitals running out of generator fuel and struggling to evacuate their most critically ill patients.

Yet volunteers Ray and Judy West of McAlester know it takes just that sort of on-the-ground effort to weave down little-known roads and rally neighbors for bedding in school gyms to keep community after community active, safe and hopeful. The Wests were victims of southern Oklahoma's massive ice storm several years back, and the Red Cross helped them.

Now they're in Louisiana, helping folks here.

After a couple of hours of dodging road debris and bypassing trees with roots as tall as a man and wide as a pickup yanked out of the ground, the Taylors finally arrived in Mount Hermon, where another Red Cross headquarters was going strong.

At least a dozen volunteers from the south Louisiana chapter monitored shelter and "mass-care" needs in 12 parishes (counties) by taping butcher paper to the walls and changing statistics with Post-It Notes. Most of the volunteers came from New Orleans and didn't know what was left of their homes.

Outside, several trucks filled with food, including one refrigerated truck holding milk, helped keep a shelter of about 400 people going in a school across the street.

While there, the Taylors bumped into a young man who remembered them from when they helped with Hurricane Ivan last year. Then a victim, he has since become a volunteer which isn't unusual in the Red Cross family.

The Coast Guard spent Tuesday rescuing New Orleans resi´ dents stranded on rooftops, one by one.

"New Orleans is now a city that is not functioning," said Mayor Ray Nagan."The city is a bathtub."

Red Cross intends to be there for how ever long it takes.