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Working under the Red Cross: Local volunteer responds at a moment’s notice

  • Floyd County resident Stewart Coulson has been a Red Cross volunteer since 2005, when he first deployed to Houston in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

  • Red Cross volunteers round up in a "debriefing" session to discuss the things they saw or experienced at a disaster site.

  • Red Cross volunteer Stewart Coulson shared this photo of an evacuation shelter, which is typical of the shelters set up by Red Cross in disaster zones.

  • Stewart Coulson, right, worked in Cedar Rapids as a flood response volunteer in 2016. Contributed photos

  • The Red Cross provides shelter, food and transportation to volunteers the organization deploys across the U.S.

  • Volunteer Stewart Coulson has been deployed to several fires during his time working with the Red Cross, most recently ongoing fires in Canada.

  • In this October 2015 photo, Stewart Coulson stands outside his tent at the Cal Fire Base Camp in Kelseyville, California, near a fire disaster area where more than 1,500 homes were destroyed. Contributed photo

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

When the Red Cross calls upon volunteer Stewart Coulson, he typically has 24 hours to board an airplane.

Since his first experience as a disaster volunteer in 2005, Coulson now keeps a bag packed at all times. He registers the months and dates in a year when he’s available for the Red Cross to deploy him. He arrives at the hotel or shelter that the Red Cross sends him to, and seeks out his Red Cross supervisor to learn what the day’s or week’s assignment is.

“Flexibility is key to volunteering for Red Cross,” said Coulson, a disaster mental health volunteer. “I went to Georgia and a couple days I worked security at the gate. Sometimes I help fill trucks at a warehouse.”

Most of the time, Coulson meets with families who have lost everything, to anything — tornadoes in Georgia or Iowa, hurricanes across the southern states, fires in California or Canada.

“I work directly with families that have lost everything, or their lives have been dramatically changed,” Coulson said. “What we talk about in the Red Cross is helping people adjust to the new normal, because it’s inaccurate to say, ‘I can’t wait until things get back to normal.'”

“When they get back to life again, it will be different than it was,” he added. “Hopefully good, and substantial and healthy, but it will be different.”

SUPPORTING GROUND ZERO

Most recently, Coulson returned to Floyd County after a two-week assignment in Fort Meyers, Florida, serving Hurricane Irma survivors. There, serving up to 500 people a day wouldn’t be unusual, he said.

“Saying how many people I had contact with is really hard from a mental health aspect,” he said.

“We’re really disaster responders. Not to be confused with first responders,” Coulson said. “We come into a site as quickly as we can, and we help people with their immediate needs, which is food, lodging, safety. Just helping them get their families together, to know that they’re OK.”

After securing short-term needs, Red Cross volunteers start connecting survivors with local, state and federal resources to establish the “new normal” for families. The Red Cross will help assess condition of homes following an emergency, and will provide up to $125 per person in a family to help with immediate needs.

“A huge part is helping people understand their resources,” Coulson said.

“We’re there as a supportive function. We’re not there for therapy. A lot of what I do … is help people get in contact with their local mental health,” he said. “I talk to people. I assure them that we’re going to get there, they’re not going to be by themselves, that we’re going to stay with them until they’re OK.”

Coulson’s favorite way to work in these areas are through an outreach team. Coulson, a health care specialist and a case worker will go into the community and work house-to-house to find residents already picking up debris who haven’t thought about registering for assistance.

“It’s incredibly gratifying and sometimes really tough,” he said.

In Georgia, he visited a destroyed mobile home court with a family to pick up mementos of their daughter, whom they had buried just that morning. He’s talked to homeowners in front of the river that washed their house away. He’s worked in communities waiting day-by-day to hear if an active wildfire is approaching or turning away on the whim of the wind.

“I’m aware that as difficult or as uncomfortable as it is for me … in two weeks I get to go home,” Coulson said.

“Some people look at it as being heroic and stuff, and it really isn’t. We’re putting ourselves down there for two weeks, we’re helping people, and in two weeks we get to go home, to our nice, comfortable homes. And these folks don’t get to do that, they have to stay there and trudge through whatever they’ve got to do.”

CARING FOR THE VOLUNTEERS

Disaster recovery is long-term — and Red Cross staff and volunteers see hundreds to thousands of people living in one of the worst periods of their lives. When Coulson was called to Houston in 2005, he arrived three weeks after Hurricane Katrina to work with exhausted volunteers and staff members.

“‘We’re really needing mental health [specialists] to get down there and help them,'” Coulson recalled the Red Cross telling him. “So I was sent to Katrina for staff and volunteers.

“I was sent to assist with the overwhelming anxiety and horribleness that the volunteers where dealing with. Lots of first-time volunteers that had never seen disaster before, and you’re going into this situation that’s overwhelmingly horrible.”

“Continuously since then, I’ve been aware that part of my duties are staff.”

Red Cross staff members and volunteers debrief at the end of each service day to talk about the good parts and tough parts of the day. In Fort Meyers, Coulson showed up to his hotel at 1 a.m., and didn’t realize his roommate was a volunteer from Mason City. The two debriefed every night during their time.

“I think a real purpose of Red Cross doing that, is people need to talk to each other. The last thing you’d want to do is go to your room every night by yourself and hold all that in,” he said.

At home in Floyd County, Coulson relies on his wife, Nina. When they’re in town, the two respond as Red Cross volunteers to fires within the county that misplace area families, providing the same kind of assistance Coulson can offer to victims of hurricanes or tornadoes.

“She’s my greatest supporter. I wouldn’t be able to go if she wasn’t doing these things. She takes care of the place when I’m gone,” Coulson said.

ONGOING MISSIONS

The scale of disaster is overwhelming. In 2017 alone, Coulson can point to multiple scenes the Red Cross has responded too — fires in California and in Canada, and hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria — all occurring at once. Iowa nearly doubled it’s volunteer base after Harvey, from 400 registered Red Cross volunteers to more than 1,000.

For now, Coulson has committed to 12 weeks at home while he serves the Charles City Middle School as a substitute counselor — turning down Red Cross calls to Puerto Rico and California disaster sites.

“There’s several volunteers that I know that went from Canada to Harvey. Harvey happened while we were there,” Coulson said. “I don’t go directly from one disaster to another. I just can’t do that. I need two weeks at home.”

“I think every time I go to a disaster, it prepares me a little bit more, it strengthens me, it gives me a little more confidence that I’m where I should be,” he added.

There are days where it feels like he may not be accomplishing much, he said. At the time he left Canada in August, the wildfires were no closer to being extinguished.

“Disasters are so monumental, you think, wow, are we really having an impact?” he said. “Now I know it’s ongoing, it takes months. I go to give some assistance to that — it’s a tiny piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the big picture.”

Now, he travels to four or five scenes a year for Red Cross. Not everyone can or needs to do what he does to volunteer, Coulson said. “There are so many different things,” and many ways to address needs in communities struck by disaster.

“The stuff that I’ve been telling kids in school for years — Mother Teresa said that unless life is lived to serve others, it’s not worthwhile,” Coulson said. “I think I come closer to understanding that and believing it every time I serve.”


 

#FLOYDCOUNTYGIVES RETURNS! 

Do you know an individual or group donating time/talents to their community? Is there a story of giving that hasn’t been shared yet? Contact Press reporter Kate Hayden through November and December by email or Twitter (@xkatehayden) with your suggestions. Let’s share the good news of what our friends and neighbors are doing this year!

 

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