By Rick Padden, Red Cross Public Affairs
Tom Bethke, a Red Cross caseworker from the Colorado Mile-High chapter, has been doing disaster relief work for Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky and Texas clients in a variety of operations, hasn’t left Colorado, and yet, hasn’t been home in six weeks.
Bethke is one of 32 Colorado volunteers who have been “virtually deploying” to help in recovery efforts from storms in Louisiana, tornadoes in Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, and a multi-family fire in southern Colorado. Not only has the Covid-19 pandemic changed the way Bethke and other Red Cross volunteers do their jobs, it’s also the reason he hasn’t been home for so long: the virus has struck at his house, and he’s had to stay away – couch-surfing at friends’ houses while working on his computer.
Bethke is no stranger to hitting the road and working with clients face-to-face – having participated in 24 disaster relief operations in 13 states just last year. He’d recently left a physical deployment to Nashville in March and was on his way back to Colorado when the state began to shut down. “I went from boots-on-the-ground to virtual on the same day,” he said, “and picked up right where I’d left off. I was working directly with a supervisor from the Assistance Support Center, and they sent me a list of cases.” Bethke said he’d been doing long-term recovery casework virtually, with the same clients he’d very recently worked with in person.
“I miss the one-on-one, but it’s really not needed in many cases,” he said. “I have the resources I need. I can look at a client’s house while talking with them using Google Earth Pro. I can map the path that a storm took online. You don’t always have to send out a hot-shot to gather information.” Bethke’s latest virtual deployment is taking him to Texas for tornado follow up.
Tools are the key – employing daily video conferencing with supervisors and team members; using RC View, the Red Cross’s visual, interactive event wizard for operations management; Google Maps; and Amazon Connect as a call center.
Anita Phillips, a caseworker from the southwest Colorado chapter, worked recently from her home in Durango with clients in Louisiana after a variety of tornadoes and storms had struck.
“It’s nice if you can have face-to-face contacts,” she said, “but a lot of this work can be done over the phone.” The Red Cross went virtual with Guam once before, she said, simply because it was so expensive to get people out there physically to help.
“We had 90 people working the Louisiana relief operation, but only seven were actually there on the ground,” she said. “They were using spreadsheets in new ways to track clients being sent to hotels, kinda reinventing the process, and I think they did a great job.”
With Covid-19 precautions in place, the opening of shelters is being avoided and hotels are being used to house clients when possible. An odd, beneficial twist to the situation, Phillips said, is that also because of the virus, there is a greater availability of hotel rooms now. And
Even damage assessment can be managed virtually, according to John Miller, of Boulder and the Mile High chapter.
Miller is an expert in that area, having supported over 100 DRs with the Virtual Disaster Assessment Team (VDAT) that he and a group of other disaster assessment managers formed several years ago. Their innovations are paying off in these trying times. “Mostly what I do is data management and cleanup,” he said. “It’s not very exciting, but I’m glad I don’t have to deploy (physically) anymore and sleep in a shelter.”
Before going virtual with most of his work, Miller had deployed over 35 times in person for the Red Cross. He just finished virtual work on the Alabama/Mississippi tornadoes, and is now working the Onalaska, Texas tornado, online. “VDAT has become much more focused,” he said, “and is now recognized by Red Cross national headquarters. People look to us now – rely on us to take care of this data for them.
“It’s mostly extracting damage assessment data from RC View (RC Collect in particular), getting it into the Client Assistance System (CAS), and creating spreadsheets that caseworkers can use.” Using aerial imagery provided by governments and other partners– sometimes from satellites, sometimes from drones and even helicopters – Miller and his team can track the path of destruction, see roofs missing, stick-built houses strewn about and trees fallen over – occasionally even spotting Red Cross teams on the ground working. Then his team can use Google Earth to compare before and after images.
“We’re going to see more and more of this, doing actual virtual damage assessment,” he said. “I was just reading the new FEMA guidance, and we’re aligned with them now too.” Miller said the nice part is just sleeping in your own bed while deploying virtually.
For Tina Harrison of Colorado Springs and the southeastern chapter, doing recovery work virtually hasn’t changed her role significantly, but finding new ways to communicate has been a challenge. Harrison, a regional co-lead for recovery (Wyoming) and recovery supervisor for southeastern Colorado, said, “It doesn’t change what I do a lot. Ninety percent our work is normally done virtually. “But It’s been very busy,” she said. She recently worked the Onalaska, Texas tornado virtually, and then shifted to the Utah earthquake and then to two explosions in Texas, in rapid succession.
Not having as many people working face-to-face on the ground can be difficult, she said. “Things can spill over into the communications with them. You have to remind them that, hey, you’ve got a whole team out here that’s working (virtually). They don’t forget you’re there, necessarily, but it’s a challenge to find new ways to communicate.” Harrison has a combined eight physical and virtual deployments, and deployed twice for Hurricane Harvey relief.