Befeler-Neuhaus: This is an interview with Lawrence Moose of the Greater Miami Chapter of the American Red Cross. It is November 20, 1992 at about 5:00 PM and the interview is taking place in the greater Miami Chapter offices. I want to take you back to the days just before August 24th, before the hurricane hit. When did you first realize that Hurricane Andrew might hit our area and impact this community?

Moose: It was probably Thursday, late Thursday, early Friday. I was watching the weather channel and it appeared to me that one of the steering systems that they thought, one of the weather patterns was going to drive it north wasn’t driving it north and it was sort of staging on a due west path so I thought we might have a little trouble, and by Saturday morning I was pretty convinced that it wasn’t going to turn. It was coming towards us.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Here at the office watching that weather channel?

Moose: No, actually I was at a friend’s house. We were watching. We were contemplating, actually this was Friday, contemplating going out and buying supplies for the family, that family. They did that, thankfully. They lived in Kendall and it really came in handy.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What were the first preparations you made for Hurricane Andrew and when were they carried out, besides what you just told me?

Moose: For me it was kind of a strange situation. My sister was down visiting me. She came down, I guess it was Saturday, not the Saturday before the storm, but the Saturday before. And she was down for the week visiting. I had taken a few days off from work to spend some time with her and I guess it was Friday when I started worrying about her leaving because she had a flight out an Sunday morning and I thought that we were probably going to have some, you know, that I was going to have to go into the office. We hoped for the best and we planned a day at the beach Saturday morning. We got through it about, we got through to noon or 1:00 before I got beeped. I was carrying my pager. I was put on alert already, but I was carrying my pager. The night duty worker, the worker on duty during the weekend called me and said better come into the office we need to start preparing.

Befeler-Neuhaus: That was midSaturday, Saturday afternoon? What are you personally required to do in your position during a hurricane according to the Red Cross’ disaster emergency plan?

Moose: I’m not actually staffed in any particular role according to the disaster plan, but with the absence of our assistant coordinator. That position was vacated. I believe it was March of this year when budgetary constraints made that funding of that position impossible at the time. Ever since that happened, I was sort of under the impression that I would be doing Mass Care, which is the feeding, shelter, and the distribution of supplies for the chapter. And that ended up being my role.

Befeler-Neuhaus: That’s part of your regular job too, somewhat?

Moose: Somewhat, yeah, I’m the coordinator of our emergency food distribution program so it is somewhat related, but that program distributes USDA commodities monthly to underprivileged households throughout the county.

Befeler-Neuhaus: That relates to mass care, which is within the shelters.

Moose: Right, Mass care is primarily opening shelters and feeding the folks, you know, in those shelters and also getting mobile feeding going to effected areas.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So that was your role, the mass care...?

Moose: I was the mass care officer.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What personal preparations? We pretty much talked about that.

Moose: Yeah, the, my for myself. When I got the call, I went home and took my sister back to my apartment. I live in North Miami. And I tried to give her some guidance on what to do, although the expected land fall was still Sunday. They had predicted. At that point they were still not sure if it was going to come our way. Still, we started moving things into closets, all the plants and stuff off the balcony. I live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building. Trying to get together candles and food and stuff for her because I knew that I was going to be working at our headquarters building so I wasn’t going to be home the whole time anyway, but I tried to get things out of harms way so if the winds blew our windows in, then I wouldn’t lose everything to the wind. Fortunately, she got out Sunday morning, very early. It was necessary for her to use any emergency supplies since the storm didn’t hit until later that day.

Befeler-Neuhaus: During the hurricane, where were you during the hurricane? You just told us?

Moose: During the hurricane, I was bedded down at the IBEW Headquarters Building. It was the Red Cross Headquarters. It’s a union hall on 17th Avenue and 17^th Street northwest. Sort of downtown in the Allapatha area.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Who was with you during the hurricane, so who was at the hurricane center?

Moose: Really the Red Cross administrative personnel in charge of the different functions that the Red Cross does during disasters, so as the mass care officer I was there at the headquarters, we had people that were in charge of staffing shelters in the staffing function. Everything was pretty much up and running. The director of the operation was there. Everyone assigned to heading a particular part of the operation was there.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Were these only local people or were they also people who came in from other parts?

Moose: I don’t believe anyone for outside of the local area had gotten there by the time before the storm hit. They were there the next day. But, I believe that it was just local Red Cross and volunteers that were working at first, initially.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What was the physical location like?

Moose: Of the Headquarters?

Befeler-Neuhaus: Of the Headquarters.

Moose: It’s basically a real large auditorium type room. Sort of looks like a banquet hall in a sense. It has a big stage on one end. I would be guessing at the dimensions, but we had throughout the room we had tables set up for the different functions, damage assessment, mass care, staffing, the officers of the job and people bustling back and forth all day trying to get going and doing their particular function and getting briefed on what they had to do. It was, compared to the way it looks now, where it is real sophisticated and there are a lot of, lots of equipment over there including computers. It was bare. We had about 20 phone lines working, each function had about two of them. Unfortunately, mine, only one of them worked so, but it was a roomy big area but it was still bustling with a lot of energy and people going in different directions.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So since then you have brought over computers and it is still running?

Moose: Right, since then as the operation has gotten more complex and we have been able to do more and more people have come in with more experience. They’ve used the same headquarters building, but they’ve had to accommodate more people in there so it is much more crowded than it used to be, but it is also much more organized than it used to be.

Befeler-Neuhaus: With more equipment?

Moose: With more equipment and it has gotten more high tech than phones and…

Befeler-Neuhaus: People?

Moose: Phones, people, pager and pencils, that’s right.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Were you affected personally by the hurricane?

Moose: If you mean my dwelling, no, my apartment is perfectly fine. I was overtired and exhausted very near after the hurricane, but no, I didn’t have any losses, no losses, yeah.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What were your thoughts or concerns during the actual hurricane?

Moose: You know, Karen, it’s kind of hard to remember. That day, when I reported into work to the Red Cross Chapter. It was about 5 o’clock, 5:30 on Saturday and we started making preparations for shipments of food to shelters there were still decisions being made about which shelters should be opened. We still weren’t sure if the hurricane was coming. The shelters are divided up into different levels and we weren’t sure which ones were going to be activated because we weren’t sure which areas were going to be targeted. So we were on the phone with Emergency Management, who makes that call about which areas get evacuated and…

Befeler-Neuhaus: Is that Emergency Management locally?

Moose: Right, local Dade County Emergency Management. And we were also on the phone with our primary vendors to supply shelters with food and water and milk and stuff like that. It’s, the reason I say it’s kind of a blur is from 6 o’clock ‘til about 2 in the morning we were making vendor contacts and getting updates on the latest information from the weather folks, from Emergency Management about which shelters they thought were going to be opened. I took my sister to the airport at about 6 o’clock in the morning on Sunday and reported, I’d gotten to home for about 34 hours, got her squared away and to the airport and got back to, by that time we were moving to the headquarters building from the Chapter to the IBEW building. I got there at about 7:308 o’clock in the morning.

Befeler-Neuhaus: On Sunday?

Moose: And it, Sunday just flew by. It was so much to do. So many people to brief on their shelters, so many supply questions and food questions that were unanswered and so many things that came up at the time. Trucks going one way or another. Shelters that could be reached and couldn’t be. Whether or not we were going to open shelters in the Keys. The information was changing so fast and the action was going so fast. It’s hard to remember real details, but I remember, I think, it must have been about 2 o’clock in the morning when I finally just passed out of exhaustion and I got a little bit of sleep, although I remember expecting at any time something to fly through the windows over there at the headquarters because the wind was so high.

Befeler-Neuhaus: And the windows weren’t boarded up at that building?

Moose: They were. We did what we could. Shuttering for that building was, we didn’t have shuttering to begin with and it was a problem because it had to be union made because it was union building and we were having trouble getting that accomplished before the storm, so what we ended up doing was taking folding tables, and the windows are very large there. So we took folding tables and took the bottom, the legs off the tables, and bolted them up in front of the windows so it really didn’t help on the outside. They were bolted on the inside, but anything large that would have flown to the window we would have been OK, but it didn’t keep them from breaking.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So it was makeshift shutters at the Red Cross headquarters?

Moose: That’s right, I think we were so worried about getting everything done for the folks who were going to our shelters that it didn’t down on us until later that, you know, something may fly through those windows at us… Lucky none of the window broke and nothing came flying through and we were just lucky in that sense. Fortunately, the windows really faced towards the west and most of the wind was coming from the east of course, so…

Befeler-Neuhaus: So after the hurricane what did you do immediately after the hurricane, say we are talking early, early, Monday morning?

Moose: I can’t even recall what hour it was because, of course, no one had power and it was still dark when we started working. The first thing that we tried to do was get in touch with the shelters immediately to see how they were and if there were any problems there, their staffing needs, their food needs, if they knew of anyone who was injured, if there were any problems at all in the shelters. That was my primary concern and then getting supplies to them and getting food to them was my second concern right away. And so we put a couple of different people in charge of that. We had a big, we had a big bottle neck at the phone lines with our phone lines. One of the phones we had, one of the lines, became dysfunctional so we couldn’t use it. So we had, we were getting calls from shelters, about 50 different shelters were open at the same time on phone lines all over the building and the building is so big we were running from one table to another to try to get in touch with these shelter managers because no one could get through on our line because it was always busy; so that’s what our immediate priority was to find out how they were out in the field.

Befeler-Neuhaus: How the people had fared in the shelters because there wasn’t information coming in during the hurricane?

Moose: There were some shelter managers that were able to call during the storm, but most of them were to busy making sure everyone was OK to pick up the phone. We really needed to get in touch with people in the field to know what was going on.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What were your first thoughts…what were the first things you thought about when you realized the impact?

Moose: Yeah I don’t think I really did realized until I got out of the building and I didn’t got out until probably 3 in the afternoon. There were, I was really too busy to look to watch the battery operated televisions people brought with them or to listen to the radio and damage assessment was still compiling information. They weren’t really at a point yet where they could tell us what the situation looked like.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So they hadn’t came back yet?

Moose: They were just getting in fact the people in to send them out. The area right around the headquarters was impassible actually to most traffic. At 3 o’clock or so in the afternoon some people came in from the Orlando watch district where they were pre-staging some, supplies and people for the hurricane after it hit. So people started going in, supplies started coming in and some people started coming into the mass care function that ended up relieving me in a couple of days and it had been, we hadn’t slept very much and we hadn’t eaten very well even just a couple of hours since Saturday and they were staying at a near by hotel and they let me go take 30 minutes off to get a shower and come right back. And it wasn’t until then when I actually went out into the area that I realized that just in this area around the airport there were so many trees down and so many roads blocked and of course no one had power. I went by one of the places that we deal with as a caterer that supplies hot food. It was just no way that they were going to be able to help us. They were on the way to this hotel so I thought I would stop by and see how they were and they were without power and didn’t expect to have it for another day. My first thoughts were what am I going to do with these shelters to get them food, but when I realized what the damage was I was awestruck even in this area and when I started hearing these reports coming in from South Dade it was hard to fathom. Then we got in touch with some shelter managers from down there and they able to tell us something, but you really don’t, I didn’t really understand it until a couple of days later when I actually got down there because had lived down there for a while in Perrine and it looked nothing like when I had lived down there. It was just, I remember drive down the turnpike extension and I got off and I guess right around Killian Drive and 112th Street is when I started seeing real damage and by the zoo and the turnpike goes on and down by the zoo that was pretty fantastic damage and I got off on Eureka Drive which is where I always used to get off when I lived down there and drove into an area which I used to live in and I just, you really can’t say anything. Tears just started coming to my eyes because it was just so different than it had been 3 or 4 days earlier. There was really nothing to say. It was just overwhelming when I saw it.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Were you down there on business or…as a Red Cross person?

Moose: I was down there on business. We had by this tine, this was…the days run into one another, I guess Wednesday or Thursday and we went down, we were on routes to go around to shelters. Because we were having so much trouble getting through to them by phone and many of them of course did not have phone service. Some of them didn’t have hand radio, a lot of them didn’t have hand radio operators when they should have, but they didn’t so communication was really bad. So we needed to know daily what was going on there. So I just took a route south once the mass care operation was handed off sort of to another more experienced person, I ended up doing shelter runs to gather information and check on the shelters. I went down there on Wednesday or Thursday and that’s when some of the shelters in that area…that’s when I got to witness it first hand what some of the destruction was.

Befeler-Neuhaus: I wanted to go back for a minute, you said that you noticed that one of your caterers wasn’t functional. Did that become a problem for you across the board?

Moose: I think on Monday, the most overwhelming feeling I had was one of not being able to do anything, being completely, kind of stripped of the ability to help people. The…, our plans were for, we had a couple of back up plans for food venders and none of them could access the food that they were going to send to the shelters because of the fact that they didn’t have power.

Befeler-Neuhaus: These are the back-ups?

Moose: Well, one was the primary that had been on the road the day before, but had only gotten to a percentage of the shelters so some of them did not have food. Some of them (the shelters) were relying on, most of them were schools and some of them were relying on the school stocks that had been left over the summer. It was a very helpless feeling on Monday when the storm had passed and you were ready to go and you were ready to go in there and really work hard to get food to the shelters and feed these people and make sure that everyone was ok, and the suppliers you had contracted with just couldn’t help you. They couldn’t get trucks out. They couldn’t get into the facilities that they owned. It was a terrible feeling because it really wasn’t, the elements weren’t keeping us from doing it, it was the fact that the electricity really made a big difference. We believed earlier that that wouldn’t make a big difference in discussing the agreements we had with those venders. We believed that they had back up power and that we wouldn’t be in a situation where we would be left helpless because of a lack of electricity, but. Monday, I remember feeling like we are spinning our wheels because we are not able to do not able to really effect change in a sense. I mean by helping these people because we can’t, you know, we are held helpless by the fact that they can’t access their own food.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Was it that they didn’t have the back up power that they thought or that the storm was worse than anyone could have imagined?

Moose: In one case, they had an electronic lock system that actually locked them out of their own facility. And there were, not many people could access the building manually. And, of course, truckers were not reporting to work because they had their own problems, I guess. So there wasn’t anyone to drive the trucks even had they been able to get into the facility. It was an unfortunate learning experience where we learned what their real capabilities were versus what we thought they were going to be of this particular vendor. And the other, the main vendor that we use for prepared food, the caterer I was speaking of only was down really a day but it took them a day to get a big enough generator to run the kitchens that they have. The one that they have, my understanding was that the one that they had was big enough to keep the building going, but not really to run the industrial kitchens that they have. But they were I think a day later up and running and we could depend on them again. That first day was really, really a terrible feeling of helplessness.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Do you think that it was an under estimation by people in general about what kind of needed they would have following and event like this?

Moose: I think we all, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated having a storm quite this bad because it was, in damage it’s unprecedented in the area of destruction. I worked in Hurricane Hugo in that relief operation. It had a large area that suffered damage, but it wasn’t nearly as severe. It covered a larger area, but it wasn’t as severe as the damage that was here. And I don’t think that anyone could have reasonably anticipated quite this bad, on a scale this big. We are all probably a little guilty of underestimating it. Because there is no precedent really for it as far as damage goes. There were bigger storms, but I don’t think any that have been quite as costly. And also something that we don’t really take into account in our planning and I am sure that the county tries and there’s not much you can do; when people are evacuated they are really evacuated from costal areas and areas that are going to flood from storm surge and from rain. They’re not evacuated from areas because of wind. There’s really nothin’ you can do and there is no where you can go to be safe from the wind, except to really sturdy structures. You can’t, there are really no areas of demarcation when it comes to areas that are going to be affected by the wind and that did more damage than anything else. The preponderance of damage was caused by the wind and not by the waters. So even though there was some water damage, it wasn’t nearly like what we saw in South Dade and Kendall. I know a lot of people who went to Kendall from the coast, from Miami Beach believing that they’d be safer and actually suffered more damage. The people they were staying with suffered more damage and then they went home and were perfectly fine. So the area that was hit, I don’t think that anyone anticipated there was going to be hit so badly. But also we haven’t had a storm in a long time. A lot of people out in the community were apathetic towards hurricanes believing they didn’t happen and when they did they weren’t going to be nearly as destructive as this one. Maybe our vendors suffered from the same feeling as the majority of the public. I’m not saying that we knew how big it was going to be or how bad or that our planning had it been executed right would have done any better. But, we certainly know now for the future. It’s a tough lesson. We did put redundancy and back up plans in for food but even those didn’t work. So we fell back on a couple of levels but none of them were able to kick in and really help for a day or so. That was a tough period personally. I remember feeling so frustrated. It’s a terrible feeling to want to help and feeling like you have the resources but you can’t do anything. You almost can’t pull the trigger on them even though they’re there.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What kind of effect has Hurricane Andrew had on your daily life?

Moose: Well, the, let’s see. The period of time right after the storm, I continued to work in Mass Care for about a week or so…going out to the shelters and assessing their situations and communicating that back to headquarters and doing what we could to help them. Then I worked in something that’s kind of new to us, in kind donations coordination. The Red Cross really doesn’t take in kind donations, but it happens every time we have a disaster we do receive them. Even though we tell folks that we take financial donations and not material donations. We still get material donations sent in so we are trying to be smart this time and anticipate the fact that we are going to have them and go ahead and try to plan for them. I worked in a warehouse that received in kind donations from all over the country, and tried to hook up local agencies that did social service work on a daily basis with these foods when they came in or tarp or whatever happened to come in off these trucks. A lot of it was real surprises. We didn’t know, trucks would pull up and we had no idea what was in them. We did our best to try to funnel it through the community agencies that existed. Did that for about 10 days to 2 weeks. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped and I had to come back here to the chapter and do some work in trying to get our food program on line and running because our orders for the month of September had been canceled because the food that we normally would have gotten diverted to the hurricane. Once we got some of that stuff going again. I was working with my assistant. He was feeling confident that things were going well again, I went back to work on the operation and managed a service center where we did social work for about three weeks and since that time and that was…the middle of October, I haven’t been working specifically on the hurricane. It’s been back to my food program…for the past month or so I have been doing what I normally do.

Befeler-Neuhaus: But it is still present in the office?

Moose: Right in front of where I sit there is a telephone bank of people that we call the hot line that take call in from the public and try to direct them through the Red Cross system. People call in for hurricane assistance, they send them to a service center. When they call in for other types of information, they try to route them to the correct source that can help them. And we are working in cooperation with some of the agencies that received hurricane relief to try to get them more food through our program. We have, of course, you interact with staff that have come from all over the country and in fact from all over the world. We’ve had a lot of people from Canada and Mexico and other parts of the world come and help…from the Red Cross. Having said that, still my work now isn’t directly what I would have been doing before. It’s not really hurricane relief anymore.

Befeler-Neuhaus: What do you see as the goals of the Red Cross during and now following Hurricane Andrew?

Moose: Well our goal is to try to meet the needs of all the disaster victims that we can help.

Befeler-Neuhaus: When you say meet the needs what is it that you mean?

Moose: Well, I mean try to assist them in getting back to normal, back to the way they were before the storm. No, we can’t do all of that and we can’t take it out of people’s minds that it ever happened. We are not trying to do that. But the organization should be trying to help with the, we should already provided for all the emergency needs with food and clothing and shelter, if possible. And now we are in a phase where we are trying to provide additional help. We see those people, still people who have never been in a service center now that are just coming in because they believed their insurance company was going to help and it hasn’t or they were waiting for the lines to go down or something at the service center. I think our mission should be to, and is in every disaster, to make sure that the area, that we have done as much as we can within what kind of services we provide to assist the area before we leave. We are not going to leave, we have a chapter here, but as far as the operation goes make sure that the needs that we can meet are met.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So you are picking up slack somewhat for the insurance companies?

Moose: Well, we are seeing, you know, whether or not you have insurance doesn’t really, doesn’t disqualify you from help and we are seeing a lot of people, that I’m sure out in the service centers thought they had insurance, but their insurance companies have folded or something. Now I know the state is making good, the insurance commissioners are making good on those claims, but there is catch up work to be done. So many people are in that situation that I believe that we are seeing a lot of that anyway. People come in, I think that we’ve got the latest figures are 59, 000 families that they’ve served so far through service centers…Red Cross and we are still referring people. We have stopped giving direct assistance for clothing and food because we feel the emergency period is over now and recovery has begun. But we are still routing the food that comes in, still from different parts of the country through that warehouse…to local voluntary agencies and we are writing referrals to those people for clients to go get food and clothes there… but that direct assistance is kind of winding down.

Befeler-Neuhaus: How has this particular hurricane affected the Red Cross’ ability to carry out these goals and serve the public? Has the impact of this hurricane been so great, let’s say, that it has made it difficult…financially…or on the staff?

Moose: I’m not sure how we stand right now for relief commitments versus donations we’ve gotten in. I don’t believe that that is a sticking point in our assistance. I believe that we will just commit ourselves to how ever much money is necessary to be spent down here and worry about collecting it, we worry about collecting it immediately of course, but if we don’t have it there then we will get it some way to make sure that people have the relief, the assistance that they need. I think it…stripped us of sort of staff in a sense and it’s also helped us staffingwise. I see that more, that part of it more than I do financial because I don’t know about the financial so much. But, I have seen so many people come through the operational headquarters now from all different places and when I was working there and in a service center we changed staff about everyday. That, we are almost running out of people after a while. Some people have come back now for 2 or 3 tours on this operation. The standard tour of duty, so to speak, for a person outside the area is weeks. We are way past the 3 week stage of course so some people have gone home for a week and come back for 3 more weeks, done that a couple of times or have just extended for an indefinite period of time. They’re down here to help. That’s giving a lot of people who didn’t have experience before in our system experience, but it’s also using up a bunch of folks. I think it really took its toll on our staff. Even though we have a lot of local volunteers, we didn’t have that many with a lot of…experience. Now they do. The got a lot of experience that hard way.

Befeler-Neuhaus: They’re tired?

Moose: Yeah, they’re tired. I guess like me after a while, I guess like everyone in Dade County feels you just want it to kind of go away. And you don’t want to think about the hurricane after a while and of course when you change over and new staff and new people come in, there is an orientation process that has to be done. They have to get in to the job, sort of, by the time they’re really in it for a week, they have a weeks worth of really productive, not that they are really unproductive, really productive work. They go home again, so. Staffing wise I’m sure that we have pushed the limit. We probably had more people working on this operation than any in our history that I can, at least that’s what I imagine. Materially speaking the local chapter is I don’t think any worse off than before as far as resources go. Certainly a lot has been brought in by the national chapter and other agencies have helped us a great deal. Second Harvest with food, Southern Baptist played a terrific role in preparing food that we got, USDA gave us a lot of food. I know about the food more than I do anything else, doing that daily. And I’m sure lots of other agencies in different capacities have helped us. It’s really… It was really frustrating the first week or so because I don’t think any of us believed, anybody doing relief, not just the Red Cross, but any agency really feeling as if we could be doing more, but I think that that had to do more with the scale of the disaster and just not anyone knowing exactly where to start. You know it was so big, what do you do first? We have a lot of people with experience, but who has experience on a categorized as a catastrophic disaster when you have never had a catastrophic disaster, quote-unquote, at the federal level? That took a little bit of time and I think that if we had it to do again I’m not sure that we could do much different because you can’t just create people with experience managing catastrophic disasters if there haven’t been any before.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So this has been two fold for the staff , it really pushed the staff to their limits but it also trained a lot more Red Cross people.

Moose: Trained a lot of people. I’m sure that most people that have come down here from Kansas and Iowa and Quebec and all these other places… will never be the same again after their time down here, but. Yeah, it’s helped us, but when I think about it that feeling of a personal helplessness that Monday after the storm and I know the feeling of helplessness that the agency felt and I think Dade County Emergency Management felt and some of the other agencies felt, you know the primary emergency relief agencies felt in not having the resources, not being able to immediately respond to the vast sea of needs that were out there and just feelin’ like we are here to do this and we are willing to do it, but we don’t have the staff, the materials, the access, all these things…the hours go by and you are thinking gosh if I could just be on the road, but you can’t make it through on the road. Knowing that people need food and not being able to get it to them. Tough situation to be in.

Befeler-Neuhaus: On that note, how do your clients and the general public you have encountered react to you?

Moose: I’m not sure that my answer is going to be quite as illuminating as other staff that were really out in the field more than me. I got to shelters like I said, but my primary duty was to go to the shelter manager and find out what they needed. When I worked in the service center, I was the manager of the center so my job was to keep the service center running and the staff kind of stable and doing what they are supposed to do. It wasn’t so much interaction with clients. Same with my time in that warehouse, that in kind donation warehouse.

Befeler-Neuhaus: You were dealing with the staff.

Moose: Yeah, I was dealing more in administration than the outreach part. But having talked to people on the phone, I can tell you about phone interactions. Certainly at the beginning of the operation people were pretty upset that we weren’t getting out to the areas. I was upset. I’m sure everybody was that not because we needed the visibility, but because we really wanted to go out there and help and they were wondering where we were. That was tough. We were telling people we were going to get to them as soon as we can but that’s not really good enough for you personally when you are working in this organization. And I’m sure it’s not good enough for them, but there really wasn’t anything that we could have done that would have gotten to people sooner that I know of anyway. It’s not an excuse. It’s the reason, but it still doesn’t really sit well with you. Doesn’t sit well with me now. And short of having fleets of you know fourwheel drive vehicles and helicopters and warehouses pre-staged all over Dade County and building hurricane proof buildings where we could put people in shelters and making that kind of commitment and just leaving those things until we need them. I don’t know that, I’m sure it with be a little better next time, but I don’t know how it could have been much better without all those things.

Befeler-Neuhaus: It sounds like what you described is like the military. They have everything ready to go and that just not the kind of operation that the Red Cross and other agencies can keep going the way the military can.

Moose: Being a voluntary agency and spending most of your money on direct relief, you are not really able to stage 80,000 cots and buy that warehouse space for years and make that kind of, have those sunken costs. Because what you are trying to do as an agency is in fact give relief for the people and we have fire and floods, in fact right now we are having a flood in Hialeah, and other disasters that come up and those are worthy things obviously to spend your money on so. We are not able to have the kinds of things and it takes a while for things to get here. Another good example of not having the resources there. We have the financial resources to help people with housing. For instance people who lost their homes, the same thing happened during Hurricane Hugo and I worked in one of the service centers in South Carolina and there are no places for these people to rent. We can give these people a lot of money as a first months deposit and rent, but we can’t create the houses overnight. No one is going to come in and build 80,000 units in 2 weeks…we have the money to give them, but there is nothing to spend it on in a sense with the rent. That was something I noticed, that was the biggest thing I noticed from Hurricane Hugo where there was a problem. But, again, you can’t create infrastructure and leave vacant pauses and vacant moving equipment just in case. We just don’t have the resources.

Befeler-Neuhaus: It takes donations and volunteers.

Moose: And it takes a little time, you know for that stuff to happen and doubling up with your families, imposing on your friends and doing whatever you have to, to get through the emergency period, but even down the line houses aren’t going to be rebuilt in a month or 2 months. I can see from living in the north part of the county how traffic is so much more nightmarish than it used to because so many people have moved from the south to the north… regardless of what you are willing to pay, there is only so much housing available.

Befeler-Neuhaus: When do you foresee the Red Cross as getting back to “business as usual”?

Moose: The chapter running as business as usual? No earlier than a year from now, probably not for a couple of years.

Befeler-Neuhaus: For a couple of years you are going to keep up the service centers and the staff?

Moose: I don’t think service centers will continue, but I think we will continue to have staff from other parts of the country work through the chapter doing additional assistance to families. Those families that didn’t get a trailer or aren’t able to get into an apartment or that need more than what is found on our standard list of assistance or things that we can assist with. There’s going to be what, 59,000 families we have assisted. That’s 59,000 cases that we have opened or have opened at one time. I can’t imagine we can close the book on those cases any earlier than a couple of years. That’s what they found out in South Carolina, too.

Befeler-Neuhaus: You are talking about rebuilding homes...?

Moose: In some cases, we are going to invest in rebuilding someone’s house and have a tremendous investment in that or assisting, putting up roofs. We’ve done that. All kinds of things, but again there are only so many contractors, too, even though we are flooded with them now I think in Dade County. They’re still working 12 and 14 hour days, 7 days a weak. You can only go so fast.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So they have to wait their turn. You have the money available for them?

Moose: I hope we do. We can always use the financial donations, but I don’t think that that is ever really going to be a hold up, us waiting to have the donations. I think we are willing to commit ourselves to paying up those debts. But the most important thing is to get some money in the community and into these people’s hands that they can spend.

Befeler-Neuhaus: You give people money with the idea that they are going to spend it locally?

Moose: Right, yeah, when we give people assistance they spend it on local resources which helps build up the business part of the community because the business were affected too, but our main focus is on the individual household.

Befeler-Neuhaus: So, in effect the Red Cross does help rebuild the community?

Moose: Right, we are in a sense writing checks for these people in their name to whatever construction company or grocery store that they want to go to or clothing store or whatever to help them out, but it also helps the businesses as well so it has a double…logistically the things, the furniture, the things, the blankets, the clothing, the food is so much more difficult and more expensive to deal with than actually giving the people the money to buy what they want. They also have to settle for whatever you can give them. When if we can pass those donations on in monetary form to the people that need them, they’ve got freedom of choice in what they want to buy and it helps the business community.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Do you see anything positive? Are there any positive outcomes that you have seen as a result of the hurricane?

Moose: Well, I think interest in the Red Cross locally has certainly gotten greater. I believe that we will probably have a lot more volunteers than we did before the storm. It is very difficult to convince people that there was any real threat of a hurricane. I don’t think that that will be a problem anymore. We certainly gained a lot of experience and we know what possibly the worst case scenario is s now. We thought we were planning for the worst case scenario before, but now I think how things can go wrong. Before, we were just having to anticipate how things might be able to go wrong. From a community point of view, not just, the Red Cross organization will have a better relationship with a lot of organizations locally in the way that they’ve helped each other. .but I think as a member of the community ...we’ve seen people ...get together and talk to each other that lived right next to each other for years and never before would have even said hello . . . Now I’ve seen whole neighborhood gather around and eat, clear debris from the area and they’re having introduced themselves because they didn’t know who their neighbors were before ...it’s now becoming more of a community and not just a place where a lot of people live.

Befeler-Neuhaus: I want to get back to something you started to say, it seems to me that you are saying that you got to put the plan into action. . .for almost this is the first time. You got to test a lot of the promises and build up relationships?

Moose: As the Director of Mass Care for a few days that I did it, the task just seemed overwhelming and when I think about how much better we could have done and it’s easy to think that we could have done a lot better. In retrospect, I’m less and less hard on critiquing how things when I think even the redundancy that we had built into the system didn’t catch us… Activating that plan…certainly gives us an idea of how to rewrite it, so part do have to be rewritten. I guess the thing abut the plan, you don’t, you never really know until you see the whole thing in action. It’s hard when you have been here for a couple of years and I have been an employee of the Red Cross for almost 4 years and to be in on the planning and to have some part of it and to feel a little bit of ownership towards it. I’m kind of disappointed I guess. But then again it was catastrophic…maybe it wasn’t so bad after all for a, quote-unquote, normal disaster maybe we would have been better off. It’s hard to be objective, I think in this organization because you want to be supportive of what we are doing and a lot of great things have happened. But you also want to be all things to all people at the time. I remember in my situation, get calls from shelter managers, who didn’t have food and you know that you won’t be able to get them food for a day. You have people that have insulin attacks, because they don’t have sugar and they don’t have that type of food. You tell people in advance to bring stuff with then and they don’t and you expect that they don’t, but there is still no way to get it to them. I think that that takes a little piece out of you every single time that happens and you can’t resolve it for them. You have to rely on how bright the shelter manager is in dealing creatively with those problems and I think that eventually led me to total exhaustion. Everyone of those little problems, they were big problems to the shelter populations, took little pieces out of all of us. That helpless feeling is what I will never, I keep saying that, one I’ll never forget. Even though, I think the organization has done well in responding to it now, but right after, I felt terrible.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Even an agency that plans and plans and plans, Andrew still made you all feel helpless?

Moose: It did… You know your organization is here to help people and you feel like you can’t and you plan to do it and everything is going good up until a certain point and then you just can’t. There is nothing else you can do. That’s a hard feeling.

Befeler-Neuhaus: Is there anything else you would like to tell us that I haven’t asked you?

Moose: I think from a personal point of view, ever since I got out of the actual relief and I have been more concentrating on providing this food that we normally do on a monthly basis, I try…almost to forget that sensation of helplessness, but almost the whole thing. I was in it for a while and then I was out of it, then I was in it, then I was out of it, and then in it. I think…when you go out and help another community and come back, it is a real positive experience. When I went out to South Carolina and came back 3 weeks later, I felt on top of the world. Go out and really help someone and come in as sort of the Calvary and you go back home feeling great. But when you live here and people are coming in to help you and you know they’re going to be leaving in 3 or 4 weeks ...and you are staying for the duration and it’s not just going to go away because you are not going to pick up and go back home wherever home is. Home is 10 miles away. It works on you mentally. It makes you tired. You know, mentally tired to think about it everyday. Then I think of the people who actually had a lot of physical damages or were hurt or something and are coming through so well it is really a terrific feeling to know that those people have that…strength…and that the community can be a community…even though we are in the relief business, it gets to you after a while thinking maybe we will never meet all these needs…maybe we will never be able to go back to business as usual…we will never be exactly the same as before, but that’s not all bad.

Befeler-Neuhaus: I thank you very much.

Moose: Thank you.