02-02-09

This is an odd experience. I recently began volunteering with the Red Cross Disaster Response and today I was beckoned for my first call. Until now I have been mostly staffing office telephones or attending frequent and diverse trainings. (So far, I have been trained in international humanitarian law, shelter management, and Client Assistant Systems.) At 5:30 this morning I was called and asked to be available to staff a canteen, which I incorrectly assumed to be a blood drive support function. As it turns out, an abandoned furniture factory had burned down during the night. The blaze had apparently consumed half a city block, and by dawn when we arrived, only a smoldering mound of brick, steal skeletal framing, and ash remained. Apparently, the local chapter of the Red Cross provides coffee, snacks, and meals for the police, fire, and rescue personnel during such responses. This morning’s call is what they refer to as a ‘3 alarm fire,’ meaning that on duty emergency workers are called from their stations, plus other alternate shifts, plus all other off-duty personnel.

It is now 2:45 in the afternoon and 2-5 Red Cross volunteers have been here feeding the emergency workers for about 12 hours. As I sit in the cab of an Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV), I am watching an enormous Dawoo Doosan, heavy equipment that I can only think to describe as a track hoe, tare down smoked-out remnants of walls. With naked steal frames and smoldering brick rubble, the scene before me has a curious and uncomfortable beauty to it. I can’t help but draw the comparison to images of 9-11, though guilt immediately follows for drawing up such a horrendous national experience in comparison for a local abandoned building fire. Still, there is a since that massive destruction took place today, and to that extent the imagery is appropriate. Yesterday, a very large 4 story building, with a foot print of 300-by-100 yards, made of brick and steal stood mightily where today the Doosan is pulling down ruins like a child’s discarded fort of limbs and dirt. This building must have stood in Lenoir for at least 60 years, and over night it has been totally defeated.

The Doosan is working on what appears to be a stairwell, a remaining tower among the ruins, and as the bricks fall in a dusty collapse it begins to rain. The clouds rolling in look as if they will bring colder precipitation, and much work is left to be done.

I am proud of myself for getting involved in something I never thought of before, proud of the emergency workers for their thankless service, and, I think, proud of my country. (I guess a remnant of 9-11 is that, for a while, the collective national psyche will respond to fires with knee-jerk patriotism, and I do not think this is a bad thing. It seems to me to be an appropriate form of gratitude.) My small role of handing out drinks and sandwiches to the men and women of multiple departments from multiple counties, while they contain a potentially more dangerous urban fire, fighting the heat of the blaze, the dangers of the collapsing structure, and even the weather to do it, does not make me feel insignificant for the tiny role I get to play. Quit the opposite, this role causes me to ask myself why I haven’t served in this or a similar capacity before. It is so easy to be an encouragement, and I believe that our community is a little bit stronger when we do.