Disasters Help Red Cross Fine-Tune Reactions

If the prospect of entertaining a couple of friends unnerves you, consider the lot of Martharuth Lefever.

One midnight earlier this month, the Ventura resident had to entertain 800 people on 25 minutes notice. Lefever knew none of her guests, nor how long they would stay. She didn’t even know much about the place where she was expected to entertain them.

No sooner had 300 of them arrived than Lefever realized she had to move them to three separate locations--each as foreign to her as the first.

A Kafkaesque catering service? No, merely another night for the disaster services director of Ventura County’s American Red Cross chapter, who oversees the efforts of more than 100 disaster volunteers and dozens of emergency radio operators.

Lefever, who is still chuckling about the game of musical shelters she had to orchestrate for an evacuation during a May 4 fire in downtown Fillmore, said her sense of humor helps her to cope.

“You might as well laugh,” Lefever said. “If you didn’t, you’d cry.”

It’s a philosophy that Lefever and her colleagues have had to test numerous times recently.

Over a 5-month period, the Red Cross has sheltered a total of 5,500 people left temporarily homeless in the wake of four separate chemical fires that unleashed or threatened to unleash toxic clouds.

Residents were driven out of their homes by a Simi Valley textile fire on Jan. 5; a Saticoy chemical company fire on April 10; a Fillmore garden supply store fire on May 4; and a fire involving a truck bound for the Casmalia hazardous-waste dump on May 10.

‘One Right After the Other’

“This is the first time that we’ve had so many, one right after the other,” said Betty Jimenez, who oversees 12 Oxnard volunteers.

Not that the chapter hasn’t been tested before. For two weeks during the Matilija fire of 1986, which licked at the fringes of Ojai, Red Cross volunteers fed and sheltered 3,000 evacuees, including 750 children from a Jewish summer camp who were on a strict Kosher diet. At the same time, the Red Cross sheltered 23 families who had been evacuated from their Port Hueneme apartment building after a gas leak.

Still, the recent evacuations were a big change from the chapter’s routine of helping the victims of between 20 and 30 house fires a year, said Brian E. Bolton, the Ventura County chapter’s executive director.

During the April 10 and May 4 fires, volunteers had to set up new shelters when shifting winds forced them to abandon the original sites. During the May 4 fire, 300 evacuees who arrived at Fillmore High School were told to leave for other shelters.

The truck and garden-supply center fires occurred within a week and two miles of each other, barely allowing volunteers time to rest, organizers said.

In three of the four crises, evacuees weren’t allowed to return home until morning, so volunteers working through the night set up cots, served coffee and doughnuts, soothed frayed nerves and secured medicine for people who had fled without theirs.

And on nearly every occasion, volunteers trained in disaster response and first aid confronted glitches they were unprepared for.

At the school that sheltered the Saticoy evacuees, the water had been turned off to facilitate plumbing repairs. The evacuees were without bathrooms until Lefever found a company willing to rent chemical toilets to the Red Cross in the middle of the night.

“My claim to fame is that I can get porta-potties at 2 in the morning,” she said.

At the Fillmore fire, none of the trucks that the Red Cross had planned to borrow in the event of a disaster were available to transport cots. Lefever said it took 30 minutes to reach the U.S. Navy’s Construction Battalion Center, which willingly loaned the group a truck.

Returning to Work

By the fourth disaster, some volunteers had already taken so much time off from work that they went to their jobs the next day without a break.

Not that these unsung heroes seem to mind; they say they’re motivated by a desire to help. “You feel like you’ve done something important,” said Alberta Munding, who supervises 15 Red Cross volunteers in Conejo Valley.

But figuring out how to be useful isn’t so clear-cut. While Red Cross officials in Ventura have compiled an inch-thick index of volunteers, locations for shelters and step-by-step strategies for handling disasters, they said that nothing prepared them for some of the problems they ultimately faced.

“We have our ground rules and guidelines, but disasters don’t always fit those,” Lefever said. “We can’t say, ‘We can only have a disaster between 8 and 5 or on Saturday and Sunday.’ It just doesn’t work that way.”

In the Simi Valley fire and gas leak, volunteers there were supposed to get cots and blankets from chapter headquarters in Ventura.

Roads Closed

But in addition to evacuating the city’s west side, law enforcement officials closed roads and highways to the west, keeping volunteers from Ventura and other west county cities out of Simi Valley.

Simi Valley volunteers had to manage close to 2,500 evacuees with help from only three Conejo Valley volunteers who had responded quickly enough to beat the blockades.

The school where the evacuees eventually settled after being shifted early in the evacuation--Simi Valley High School--had to provide cots and blankets.

Much planning had gone into how to handle evacuated schoolchildren. But nobody had thought about their parents. Shortly after the evacuation was called at 11 a.m., parents began arriving in droves. Many claimed not only their children but those of their neighbors, thinking that they were being helpful.

But parents who didn’t know of their neighbors’ generosity later panicked when they couldn’t find their children at the shelter.

“Everybody was in such utter chaos you didn’t have time to think,” said Terry Brake, a cable company sales representative who directed the Red Cross’ Simi Valley evacuation.

Procedures Revised

Red Cross officials have since met with school and city officials to ensure that such confusion doesn’t occur again. Parents will not be allowed to claim children at a Red Cross shelter without showing identification. And they can take only their own children, unless written permission forms on file with the schools allow them to take others.

The Ventura County Red Cross plans to supply every volunteer with a hand-held radio to aid communication in such instances. And the organization hopes that city governments in the county will provide money to buy cots and blankets for each city.

This, Bolton said, is especially important in the event of a big earthquake, because roads would be torn apart and access blocked for supplies from other locations.

In fact, local Red Cross volunteers view the recent string of disasters as a bit of a boon.

“These small-scale disasters help us to see where the problems will be in a major one,” said Munding, the Conejo Valley volunteer. “It saves us from going in cold.”