‘They think we just come out of the trees somehow.’

The comforting cup of coffee starts here, in a brightly lighted, high-ceilinged room in Valencia.

After a disaster, someone from the Red Cross will show up with a cup of a coffee, or a meal and a blanket, or set up a refugee shelter in a school or church.

Who are those people, and where do they come from? Why did they get out of bed at 2 a.m., without pay, to brew coffee for the crews fighting a brush fire? Who brought in 500 peanut butter sandwiches for families sitting out a flood in a school gym?

There were 19 of them, eight men and 11 women, ranging in age from 9 to none-of-your-business. They turned out for a class in “mass feeding” by the Santa Clarita Valley Red Cross office, the first step on the road to the 2 a.m. phone call and lunch for 500.

“I’ve just always wanted to do this,” said Shirley Rich of Saugus, a ponytailed blonde in faded jeans. “I enjoy helping others. I suppose it’s why I became a nurse.”

Rich brought her daughter, Rachel, 10, and son, Josh, 9--tall, serious children who paid close attention and had no trouble keeping up with the adults.

“They have a youth group,” Rich said. “The kids help set up cots, pass out food, things like that.”

Disaster specialist Charles Hagan and mass care supervisor Ken Obayashi welcomed the recruits. Hagan had them suggest all the types of disasters they could think of, especially any they had been involved in some way.

It was a class with a curse on its past.

Members had been in everything from train wrecks to exploding apartments. As longtime Californians, almost everyone had been in several earthquakes. Midwestern transplants had been in tornadoes. Greg Foster, a 41-year-old insurance executive from Newhall, said he once had to be airlifted from Death Valley when the desert was swept by a freak snowstorm.

Hagan told the class that the appearance of a Red Cross disaster worker with hot coffee or a cold drink, as early as possible after a disaster, is vital not only to victims and rescue workers, but to the image of the Red Cross.

“You may be dealing with people who’ve just lost everything, and the reactions range from a kind of resigned quietness to the edge of hysteria,” Hagan said. “But you put a blanket around them, hand them a cup of coffee, and you can see them change, see them start to think, ‘maybe it won’t be so bad after all.’ ”

The volunteers were encouraged to show the flag as prominently as possible, even if only by high-tailing it to the site in a station wagon with a big Red Cross placard and a coffee urn on the tailgate. A swift response “builds confidence in the Red Cross,” Hagan said.

The students were repeatedly, firmly told they could not accept money at a disaster, including donations to the Red Cross.

“Tell them to mail the money in,” Hagan said. “We’re still trying to live down the rumor that we sold coffee and doughnuts to the troops in World War II. It never happened, but we still get people who say they won’t donate to the Red Cross because they believe that.”

Hagan explained the many ways the Red Cross acquires food in an emergency, ranging from establishing credit in advance with wholesale food suppliers to simply loading up at a fast-food outlet.

The students got written lessons filled with information of limited use to most people, but which may be very important to them someday.

(A mass feeding station will need six clothespins for attaching coffee bags to kettles. A kitchen for 500 needs 10 potholders, and 250 pounds of cooked cabbage will serve 1,000 people. The proper amount of peanut butter to make 500 sandwiches is 35 pounds. To feed 1,000 persons an hour takes a staff of 64, only four of whom are chief cooks. Avoid cream sauces and beware hash and meat pies, which spoil.)

Watch out for special cases, such as diabetics and very young infants. (Four ounces of evaporated milk, 8 ounces of water and a tablespoon of corn syrup make a formula for a newborn.)

Some of the students began to grasp what they were getting into.

“Are there people in charge that we help, or are we going to be in charge?” one woman asked.

“We don’t want to just throw you to the wolves,” Hagan said. “You go out as assistants at first. However, if the 8.3 earthquake is tomorrow. . . .” He shrugged eloquently.

At the break, over coffee and cookies, Mary Jo Andreasen of Canyon Country, (“who will be the voice on the other end of the phone, telling you to get up and on the road at 2 a.m.,” as Hagan introduced her) told the volunteers they would spend most of their time outside the Santa Clarita Valley.

The Santa Clarita office, a branch of the Van Nuys office, gets a comparatively large number of volunteers. It can field a force of 50 plus at least 15 nurses, she said: “It’s still a very close community up here, and all the local organizations get a lot of support--Moose, Elks, church groups, everybody.”

But there are relatively few local disasters --”an occasional house fire or I-5 gets closed by snow”--which tend instead to afflict the urban area to the south. So they will spend much of their time in the San Fernando Valley, she told them, or places such as Hollywood, where Santa Clarita volunteers ran a shelter after the October earthquake.

“I had a lady say once that she knew the Red Cross was a volunteer organization, but she didn’t imagine they were the people next door,” Andreasen commented.

“They think we just come out of the trees somehow. Everybody thinks somebody else is doing it.”