Local man works in Hurricane Sandy aftermath
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It was 10:30 p.m. late in October when local businessman Dennis DeVries received a call from the Federal Emergency Agency. By 12:30 a.m., he had a plane ticket to New York City.
DeVries had signed up to be a FEMA worker a couple of years earlier.
Photos and stories about Hurricane Sandy and her violent visit to the East Coast of the United States, particularly New York and New Jersey, had bombarded the news so DeVries was familiar with the emergency he was heading into.
Off he went to Brooklyn, New York. He was assigned to FEMA Community Relations, and he and his team were “boots on the ground.”
Their job was to walk into flooded areas to find people trapped by the water and show them how to apply to FEMA , “from initial contact to an inspection visit, rent assistance, housing, repairs, insurance, everything,” he said.
Once people were in the system, they received a case number and could track everything that happened.
Team members were from Georgia, Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, D.C. and Montana.
DeVries said. “Our team is down to six, but they are still calling people up and adding to the teams.”
One of his first purchases was a GPS, since he kept getting lost in the city. Other members of his team were leery of driving, so DeVries took the wheel.
The worst site, he said, was a fairly new house in the middle of the street. Many people pulled everything out of their houses and piled it on the curb, so pedestrians were walking through mountains of garbage with chairs, sofas, spoiled meat and carpet for a couple of days.
City of New York, Army, Navy and Marine personnel showed up with front-end loaders and flatbeds, gravel trucks and garbage trucks and started hauling all the debris away.
“I saw a 40-acre field stacked 20 feet high with garbage, and that was early on,” DeVries remembered. “I wanted a picture of that, but traffic was too bad.”
In some places DeVries and his team visited, people were afraid to leave their houses and were afraid to come out to talk to the FEMA workers because of gang activity.
With no telephone service, gang members could just knock in a door and take what they wanted, DeVries explained.
After customer relations FEMA workers like DeVries relayed these reports and witnessed broken doors, the police moved in to stop these activities with all-day, all-week patrols. After two weeks, the officers were pulling back a little, DeVries said, “but still doing a good job of being everywhere they can.”
His team worked 12-hour days, with about three hours spent commuting each day. FEMA workers are housed away from their work sites, leaving local lodgings for displaced people, who work nearby and whose kids attend neighborhood schools.
FEMA workers must agree to stay for 30 days, but DeVries said he was willing to stay longer if needed. He’d like to see if he can better understand the FEMA system.
Interested people who would like to work for FEMA may go online at www.usajobs.gov and type in FEMA.
