10/24/2005 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting 10/24/05 Page 5 lot of negative press. He can say, however, there were a lot of organizations out there. Everyone was working for a common goal. He personally came away with a great feeling. They had two main missions. The first one was down in Fort Worth where they were able to canvas that area and locate approximately 10,000 families that had relocated. They worked in shelters. He was in charge of a roaming division down there and consequently when the FEMA Director was replaced by David Paulison, a retired firefighter, the upper command staff was taken away from them and they were sent to Austin, TX to be a presence in that headquarters there in Austin. Their second mission was down in Beaumont. There was a little bit of a time lapse before they were sent down there. There was an issue whether or not they needed to go in front of Rita or behind Rita. If they were in front of Rita, they might become part of the problem as far as food and water. That was the final week of their deployment. They were basically dropped in to a situation that was pretty chaotic and demanding, but he is proud to say that the guys under his command all stepped up. They had approximately 120 firefighters around the nation when they started in Atlanta and they ended up with 92 firefighters down in Beaumont. Every one of them wanted to stay until the last day. They did what they came to do. They took care of a lot of people. They took care of their primary missions of their community relations work and their PEA's which is preliminary damage assessment, going out into the field and looking at the homes to see if they were missing a roof or siding or flooded. They did have to do some office work and computer training. They did a lot of special op missions where they were helping people that they were first contact with. Hundreds of thousands of people. As part of the safety forces, they felt it was their duty to act and deliver food and water to those people that they had first contact with. There are a lot of grateful people down there that they met. John thanked everyone again for their support. It was a great experience. Personally he would like to go back for a couple of weeks, but he needs a little down time. It is quite an undertaking for any department in the United States to handle back to back catastrophes. Luckily Wilma kind of cruised across Florida and is on her way. Presentation by Gino Carcioppolo Gino indicated that John covered just about everything. They were together the whole time. Presentation b~Sergeant Whitehead Sergeant Whitehead indicated that John and Gino worked in the same area as he did. The last week, they were in the Beaumont area, close to the area he was at. He worked out in the Houston disaster assessment headquarters. From that area, they covered 30 counties for initial damage assessments. Pretty much what John was doing with FEMA, except they were through the Red Cross. They had about 102 people who were disaster assessment team members from the headquarters. They were all volunteers. They had total in the region around 26,000 volunteers for the Red Cross. The only difference as far as the people he was working with is they were all