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THE ARCHULETA COUNTY RED CROSS
Your home just had a fire or the latest winter storm has caused your roof to collapse. Or, perhaps the sheriff has just advised you that there is an emergency, and you have to evacuate your home. Where will you go? It’s cold, and in this turmoil your family is upset, cold, and hungry. You ask yourself, “Where will we stay? What do we do now? Who can help us?”
Yes, Virginia, there is a Red Cross chapter in Archuleta County. The Southwest Colorado Chapter of the Red Cross, our parent chapter, is headquartered in Durango and covers the five southwestern counties. Though they have tried to support the county over the years, the distance from Durango to Pagosa Springs was very often, just too great for a timely response by their volunteers. With their encouragement, guidance and the support of the region’s disaster managers, fire chiefs and some dedicated local citizens who saw the obvious need, a small group of us put forth the effort to establish a local capability. While attempts to do this have been made in the past, they were severely challenged by the tremendous time and effort required to startup and run such an operation. We certainly hope that this time, we’ll endure, and so far, we have.
We are a small local Disaster Action Team (DAT) of 17 members (as of this writing) who have been trained to help on small local disasters, such as house fires, storms or small floods. We help those affected by a disaster with assistance in providing temporary food, clothing, medical and shelter. We also support emergency services personnel such as the Fire Department, and Search and Rescue (SAR) when they are on extended calls.
Our plans are to become qualified for Mass Care, which means the capability to set up and run a shelter if we have evacuations in our area. Such an effort would require help from volunteers across the region. Our chapter is comprised completely of local volunteers who have given their time to not only set up operations, but to take the required training. Since we are not large enough to have a facility, when an emergency occurs, we are activated, and operate out of the SAR base at the old airport entrance on Piedra Road, along with the county emergency services team. Our emergency gear, is stored by the wonderful folks at the Humane Society.
We often coordinate our help with that of the many other support groups, located here in town. We have received welcome support from local hotels, restaurants, medical and welfare agencies with donations, discounted goods and services to support those we help.
All of these great groups (including The Methodist Church, KLnights of Columbus, and The Pagosa Outreach Connection, to mention a few,) do their best to pitch in and help. We have a watch team that is always on call, and local emergency services personnel know how to reach us or we can be reached through our watch cell phone (970)759-8438, or via the Sheriff’s dispatch phone service.
In the Spring of 2005, a week before we became formally operational, we were greeted by the spring floods. It was time to test ourselves in the real world. We helped 3 families that were temporarily displaced. We also supported the sandbag and emergency response crews with food and drink (graciously provided by local merchants,) as well as the SAR crews that were working on searches. We were also ready to setup a shelter if the waters had continued to rise and mandatory evacuations were required.
Later that year, during the Hurricane Katrina and Rita crises, two of Pagosa’s local DAT volunteers, Kathie Baughman, and one whom wishes to remain anonymous, were deployed to the affected areas to run two Red Cross shelters and otherwise assist with the efforts there. At the same time, up here in Archuleta County, we had the opportunity to assist one of the families that had relocated to our area after the disaster. The rest of our local volunteers were “on standby” to assist with shelter operations in Farmington, where FEMA was very close to placing a large shelter for Hurricane Katrina’s homeless.
Many don’t know that the American Red Cross is chartered, but unfunded, by Congress to provide disaster services to the community and that 97% of the membership is comprised of volunteers. The organization is almost entirely operated by public donations. Most local operations do not cover their costs and are subsidized by the regional or national organization.
If you are interested in becoming an Archuleta County Red Cross DAT volunteer or making a donation to the local Southwestern Colorado Chapter, please call Frank Elge at (970)903-8746.
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