Muggy Louisiana greets volunteers

Deanna Schnabel prepared herself for a shock when she flew to Louisiana to assist victims of Hurricane Gustav. The biggest shock, though, was one she hadn’t anticipated.

That was the heat. In the wake of the hurricane, which slammed the Gulf Coast last week, a number of areas lost electricity — which, at the tail end of a muggy Louisiana summer, meant no air conditioning. When Schnabel, a Newport Beach resident, arrived with 29 other Orange County volunteers to assist the American Red Cross, she saw residents lined up around the street to buy generators and ice. In the shelter where she stayed with other volunteers, she had to take care not to slip, since the humidity in the air dampened the floors.

“We take it for granted in California,” Schnabel said by phone from her shelter in Lafayette. “If we lose our electricity in California, the weather is still quite comfortable. Here, it can be 80, 90 degrees with an equivalent level of humidity. You can’t sleep in that weather. It affects everything.”

Schnabel, who worked as a government analyst in Santa Fe Springs before retiring, flew to Louisiana last week for a three-week deployment. She started out helping Gustav victims, but may move in the coming days to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. Since she departed, the Red Cross’ Orange County office has increased its volunteer personnel in Louisiana to 43 people, according to Public Information Director Daphne Hart.

After a natural disaster, the Red Cross sends e-mails to all its nationwide chapters, which in turn contact their local volunteers to ask for assistance. Each crisis is given a list of “hardship codes,” including power outages, water disruption, housing shortages and other problems, to let volunteers know what kind of situations they will have to deal with.

“We want them to go with the right expectations of what their environment is going to be like,” disaster specialist Ray Greenwood said. “We want them to know it’s hot and humid, just in case they were expecting California weather.”

Schnabel had never worked in a hurricane region before, but she had gotten Red Cross experience serving with the organization’s Rio Hondo chapter. In Louisiana, she has fulfilled two jobs: venturing into communities to bring supplies to residents, and helping to feed and support the other volunteers at her shelter.

The people she’s worked with, Schnabel said, come from all over the country, but they bond quickly enough. At one point, she said, she met a police officer who was helping distribute supplies, and his eyes welled with tears when the volunteers began sharing their stories with him.

“He looked at us and said, ‘God bless you,’ ” Schnabel said. “And all I could think of to say at that moment was, ‘You’re not alone.’”

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].