Disaster Training Provided for Hundreds

As Hurricane Season approaches, hundreds of volunteers are learning how to respond to disasters. MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports.

It’s the middle of the day and a half long service delivery site class and 30 volunteers from Mississippi and Louisiana are listening intently on how to organize a disaster sight. They are part of the almost 300 volunteers who are spending the week in Bay St.Louis attending the Red Cross Disaster Training Institute. Steve Butts a volunteer from Gautier, says he got his first exposure to the Red Cross after his home was flooded during Hurricane Katrina,

“I’m repaying the favor by trying to help people that will be in the same situation.”

The 300 volunteers will attend classes including disaster kitchen training, statistic and financial information sharing, and site management. Paige Roberts, executive director of the southeast chapter of the Mississippi Red Cross, says what’s so important about this disaster institute is that it’s creating a network of local volunteers in an area of the country which is disaster prone,

“And because of that we want to be as strong as we can be locally to help ourselves as much as we can right away rather than having to wait for the Calvary to come in from elsewhere.”

The cross training of volunteers in a variety of fields is expected to dramatically increase the number of local volunteers on the Gulf Coast.