B. R. Forbes: FEMA Notes from the Field
Dallas

The address we had been given for the Dallas Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) turned out to be the Dallas Convention Center. I eventually found the FEMA office (“go to the men’s room, take a quick left before the restroom door, and enter the box office.”) The DRC itself was in the basement.

By that time, Hurricane Rita was gathering force and predicted to hit east Texas – the very place were to set up a new DRC. So the team of about 35 federal employee transferees went through another day of classroom training in Community Relations (establishing contacts in advance of creating a DRC) and Preliminary Damage Assessment (estimating the federal costs of damage to homes, which are added up to create the budget estimates submitted to Congress and the President.)

For another two days, we worked in the Dallas DRC in order to put our training to work and to get a feel of how a DRC worked. Then on Saturday, Hurricane Rita made landfall and swept up the Texas/Louisiana state line.

As it turned out, the bulk of the hurricane damage just missed Tyler -- which was uniquely positioned to provide disaster relief to the evacuees that came north from the east Texas coast from Louisiana. But Tyler did not totally escape the destruction of Hurricane Rita, as we discovered.

Tyler


The job of our 35-member team was to establish and run a Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) in Tyler, Texas. We were originally tasked with providing Individual Assistance (IA) disaster relief for an estimated 5,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees. However, our role assumed new urgency with an estimated four times that number of Hurricane Rita evacuees.

The location was a former thrift store in a strip mall with ample parking on a major road just south of downtown Tyler. We moved in supplies, washed windows, mopped floors, set up 60 tables and 600 chairs, connected laptop computers, and hung signs.

The local media discovered that FEMA was coming to town and Channel 7 aired a report the evening of the day we set up. (I'm the guy in the FEMA hat walking behind and to the right of the reporter in this photo.)

The next morning at 7:30am, we were met by a long line of evacuees. Disgruntled shopping plaza store owners taped off parking spaces and hired security guards to keep homeless evacuees from parking in front of their stores!

However, this was nothing compared to the next week when the American Red Cross (ARC) announced that it was giving away debit cards to qualified Katrina and Rita evacuees. People started lining up at about 4:00am. After the first day of complaints from the shopping plaza store owners, the ARC decided to give away "tickets" to specific day parts -- at the Tyler Convention Center three miles away!

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