Some of the 50 or so American Red Cross volunteers from Iowa who went to help victims of Hurricane Florence are returning to the state.
Maurice Evans of Sioux City started out helping in a shelter in North Carolina after arriving in the area. He says the hurricane wasn’t the only thing they had to worry about as one of the days they had a tornado warning and all of them had to gather in the hall of a school and it turned out to not impact them. Evans says the build up to the storm and then the evacuation led around 188 people to the shelter where he was working.
“Quite a few of them were kind of disoriented because they didn’t exactly what was going on. All they knew is they had to leave the house because the storm was coming and they were thinking it was going to flood right away, so they had to leave their homes… most of them lost electricity,” he says. Evans was later sent to deliver food and supplies and says that was an adventure.
“It took us six hours to go seven miles, the roads were so blocked up, and everybody was trying to get around the roads that were closed,” according to Evans. “They had the highway patrol and the military trying to direct traffic and it was a bottleneck for awhile.” He says the flooding made travel difficult every time they went out.
“Sometimes we’re headed out to a place where they want us to go and then they’ve got to call us and tells us that those roads are closed and we are going to have to go a different route… and sometimes we had to go three, four, five miles out of the way,” Evans says. He says things went well despite the uncertain nature of the storm.
He says it was pretty organized, but they didn’t always know what was going on and every morning had a meeting to discuss their daily assignments. Evans left on September 11th and returned to Iowa on the 24th.