I would like to give my personal THANK YOU to all of the HOPE volunteers that put aside they day-to-day lives to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was truly inspiring for me to have 12 HOPE volunteers and trucks enroute to Baton Rouge within 48 hours of the request for deployment that I received on Saturday, September 3rd.
The response to the broadcast e-mail from our membership was truly inspiring! While we deployment most of our volunteers from the neighboring southern states and the Midwest, several came from as far away as Washington and California. We even had offers of help from HUMMER owner groups in Canada.
Our HOPE team was fortunate to be able to set up a staging area at the Gerry Lane HUMMER dealership in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Mr. Terry Bell, General Manager of the dealership, had called Linda North shortly after the hurricane to offer the dealership facilities should the HOPE team deploy to the area. The dealership set aside a room we used as a barracks and offered mechanical support for our trucks with complete backing from our friends at AM General.
The first several days 'behind the lines' proved to be a challenge. As thousands of relief volunteers poured into the area, we observed the local management system for relief efforts was strained well past its limits Despote these management problems and our slow start, we soon found our purpose; one good deed after another. We learned much from this deployment and are making changes in our program to address those identified improvements.
The HOPE team performed many different tasks for the relief effort. We estalished several 'firsts' for the American Red Cross. We are the first 'team' to provide privately owned vehicles for an American Red Cross disaster response AND we were the first 'team' to provide 'mobile medical response vehicles' when we carried doctors and nurses into the affected area to give vaccinations and well-being checks. Listed here are just a few of the hilights we experienced during the relief effort.
- Transported damage assessment teams into the affected areas
- Transported and distributed supplies, food, water, first aid kits and gloves
- Provided road and recon reports from the outlying New Orleans area
- Assisted Washington Parish
- Assisted Covington OEP
- Transported film and media crews
- Provided trucks to the American Red Cross Mobile medical units
- Provided trucks to Sheriffs Dept. near Slidell, LA
- Transported communications equipment to remote locations many miles from our base camp. Helped assemble and install satellite antennas to help establish gulf coast network of satellite communications for disaster relief efforts
- Delivered generators from Washington DC to Alabama and Mississippi
- Conducted HOPE Trail Endorsement class at the Gerry Lane HUMMER dealership, adding 20 more locally trained HOPE members for future use in the Baton Rouge area
- Assisted family that had a tree fall on their house while they were in bed and had been living in a truck for 2 weeks
- Winched many cars from doors of houses so owners could gain access to their homes to remove their personal belongings
- Cut trees and debris around emergency center streets and sidewalks
- Transported nurses and EMT ersonnel from the Hospital Ship Comfort in Gulfport for door to door well-being checks of residents, providing vaccinations and other medical assistance
- Assist NYFD, who was working in New Orleans
- Delivered meals in Mississippi serving over 5000 meals in two days
- Transported the Southern Baptist Disaster Response Team president and his local Directors to help find a location for a field kitchen, thereby bringing hot meals to a town that had not seen 'real' food for the last 14 days.
- Transported the ARC media crew into the hardest hit areas for a documentary film
Had we only been able to hepl one family or deliver one hot meal, the sacrifice given by our members would have been well worth it. We were lucky to have hundreds of those successes.
Once I returned home, it was hard to relate to everyone what the team had experienced and all the good that we had accomplished. I am sure that everyone connected to this first national deployment of the HOPE program had a lump in their throat and a warm spot in their heart when they told their families about their activities serving the victims of the largest national catastrophe in the United States.
I have always know HUMMER owners to be a special and independent group. We owe our success to our HOPE volunteers, many who had previous disaster relief experience. Their skills in resource management, search and rescue, plus their advanced medical training made them 'able ambassadors' for our HOPE program. I am thrilled to be associated with each and every one of you and proud to call you friends AND heroes. Thank you again for stepping up and showing the world that HUMMER owners are a talented and sharing/giving group.
Get in the system, train and "Together, we can make 'HUMMER' the sign of HOPE."
