Red, White and Rewarding : O.C. Red Cross Volunteers Are Aiding Northridge Quake Victims

The powerful aftershock ripped through the temporary Red Cross shelter here, sending hundreds of terrified earthquake refugees bolting for the door. Carol Beuschlein, a 20-year Red Cross veteran from Westminster, heard a shelter worker yell, “Cut them off at the pass.”

Calmly surveying the panic around her, Beuschlein began to circulate among the mostly Spanish-speaking evacuees, reassuring them that there was no danger of the building collapsing.

“We wanted to keep the people in, because we were afraid that they would break through the glass door,” Beuschlein said Thursday, recounting the incident that occurred just two days after the devastating Northridge quake. “I found a little girl who I nicknamed ‘Mickey’ because she was wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt, to translate and tell people that everything was OK.”

Beuschlein, a 37-year-old former ambulance driver, is among the dozens of Red Cross volunteers dispatched from Orange County to operate one of the busiest earthquake shelters in the Los Angeles area.

While relief operations were at their peak, the volunteers typically logged 12- and 14-hour shifts. Some even gave up their vacations so they could get the time off from work.

“The day of the quake, I called the Orange County chapter and they said they needed me,” said Tom Sipe, 37, an operations coordinator at John Wayne Airport. “I walked into work and told them I needed to go and they said it was OK as long as I took vacation time.”

Sipe has worked as an assistant to shelter manager John Kulla, a 31-year-old chef from Anaheim, since the day after the quake. When Sipe’s shift ends, he spends the night at a Los Angeles-area hotel until it is time for him to return to his shelter duties the next day.

“A vacation is for doing something you like to do, and to me that means helping others,” Sipe said. “Even if I couldn’t have gotten the time off, I would have come out here and worked on the weekends.”

Under the Red Cross policy of mutual aid, whenever a major disaster becomes more than a local chapter can handle, volunteers are sent from all over the country. Volunteers have come from as far away as Colorado and Louisiana to help Northridge quake victims, their red and white emergency vehicles packed with first-aid kits and other supplies.

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But the San Fernando Recreation Center on Park Avenue, now converted into an evacuation site, is operated almost entirely by Orange County volunteers--many of whom began arriving just hours after the quake. Like Beuschlein, many believe it was only God’s will--or sheer luck--that kept the disaster from striking closer to home.

Now they feel it is their duty to help those who found themselves homeless simply because of the accident of geography.

For the volunteers, it has been a rewarding, albeit exhausting, experience. On one night last week, more than 1,100 evacuees were at the shelter, sleeping on cots inside the gym. More than two dozen Orange County residents have worked at this site, which was “adopted” by the county’s Red Cross.

In one day alone last week, volunteers served 4,000 meals. They struggled to maintain order amid a sea of shattered nerves, monitoring the distribution of drinking water, blankets and toys for the children. They provided a sympathetic shoulder for people who had lost loved ones and had nowhere else to turn.

“This guy came in one day last week and his girlfriend had been killed in the apartment building in Northridge,” said Muriel Bagley, a volunteer from Huntington Beach. “He just kept saying, ‘I have to keep busy, I have to keep busy.’ I talked to him for a little while. It’s just so sad, it makes you want to cry.”

On Thursday, nearly 300 people who had spent the night--afraid or unable to return to their homes--bombarded shelter volunteers with requests for assistance. “Do you have anything to eat?” “Can you tell me where the FEMA office is?” “Do you have any teddy bears left for my children?”

Inside a converted gymnasium overflowing with cots where many had spent the previous night, families huddled together in small groups. Others crowded in front of a small television set, while countless other weary, disheveled evacuees lined up to collect their lunch ration of corned beef hash, peaches, bread and soft drinks.

The greatest responsibility has fallen on Kulla’s shoulders. As shelter manager, it is he who must order the food and other provisions and enforce the shelter rules.

Kulla, another longtime Red Cross volunteer, first joined up in his native Spain and has worked major disasters from hurricanes in Europe to the earthquake in Mexico.

“So it didn’t hit Orange County this time. But it could have,” Kulla said, explaining his reasons for becoming a volunteer. “And if it did, they’d be doing this for us instead of the other way around.”