Heeg work ethic

One thing that always amazed me was the loyalty and work ethic my aunt Mimi, father and uncles possessed as it related to their jobs.  My Aunt Mimi never took a sick day in her whole career.  I can only remember four times when my father took sick time - once when he was "overcome by smoke" in a fire, when he had the flu, when he had poison ivy all over his arms and face and when he had hernia surgery - the result of picking up a cast iron boiler he was replacing. 

"Overcome by smoke."  That phrase used to roll off my friends and my lips very easily when we'd don our father's turnouts and helmets and use the garden hose to put out pretend fires.  Then one of us would drop to the ground yelling, "I've been overcome by smoke."  And someone else would grab the hose and fight the fire.  Of course what we didn't realize was that was about as close to death as you get in a fire...if you survive.  My father was lucky being on the engine that there were always some other guys on the hose with you to take your place or drag you out.  These were the days before SCBA was used by all firemen entering a burning building.  They just crawled in under the smoke, no eye or face protection.

I remember my friend Jimmy Theinert showing off his father Bill's melted leather helmet.  He was a lieutenant, pretty gung ho, like the older brother in "Backdraft".  One of the few firemen who lifted weights to keep in shape (so he could lift his 300 lb muscular dystrophy striken son).  But he and his company were first due and attacked a lumber yard fire by themselves.  They turned their helmets around so that the extended rim in the back used to keep water out of their coats was used as a face shield.  It was usually a graceful curve on it, but his melted down to about a 75 degree angle.  I don't know how their faces stood up to that heat.

My father recalled a fire where his buddy and he were at the nozzle, crawling in under the smoke and came to the kitchen.  Through the smoke they could see feet and the lower legs of someone standing in front of the cabinets.  After they reached the person, the victim was a man who was trying to use the sink, perhaps to get water to douse the flames, but was baked in place by the heat.

I remember many winter nights when my father became an oil heating system repairman, when he would be called out to get someones oil burner running again.  Pretty sure there was one Christmas eve when he was called out to a house in Old Westbury, where the guy's indoor pool room furnace crapped out and the guy gave him a candy bar as a tip.  There was one winter night when three of his co-workers were on graveyard shift and they met up to share a bottle.  They all passed out in the truck and ended up with such bad frostbite, they all lost their feet.  His friend, Gene Parente, was really overweight, and when they went to jobs, they had to carry toolboxes with everything they might need, probably about 50 lbs or so of tools in each hand.  One day Gene gets to a call, picks up his tools, walks up towards the door of the house, where the woman was waiting.  He says to the woman, "I don't feel so good."  Boom, keels over from a heart attack, and that was it.

My father was very commited to customer service, and always ensured the job was done right.  He would always complain about guys who were just going for numbers of calls.  I can't count the number of times he was called to go fix someone else's incomplete job.

The brothers did have their share of fun at work.  I remember one time he said him and his friend were standing outside the firehouse, watching the traffic and trains, drinking cokes out of cans.  Of course there was some rum in the cans too.  The chief pulled up and was talking to them before inspecting the station, the whole time not realizing they were having more than coke.  Fortunately it was a pretty slow house.

I'm not sure what the situation was with gear in the firehouse.  I'm sure there were some things that firemen had to supply or replace on their own.  I imagine that was the case with badges, because my father was always soldering his to keep it in one piece.  Obviously the quality, extent and symmetry of the soldering wasn't perfect.  One time during an inspection, one of the chiefs noticed it, made a comment and touched it; at which point it decided to fall apart in his hand.

My uncle Chris was a well known jokester.  His firehouse had a chief who was a real ball buster who ate Shredded Wheat every day for breakfast.  One day my uncle took the straw broom and pulled out some of the finer straws, cut them to the right length and wove them into the Shredded Wheat buscuits.  The other firemen where in on it and had a hard time keeping straight faces, watching the chief try to chew his way through his breakfast.

Once there was a building collapse that took the lives of several firemen in the early 60s.  Big front page news.  My Aunt Jane died around that same time from thyroid cancer.  A few months later, my Uncle Chris was a lieutenant and was with his men in a basement when the building collapsed on top of them.  Fortunately they were in a void and protected.  They were lucky to have survived, but the rescue teams had to jackhammer a hole in the foundation to get them out.  There was a picture of him with my cousins on the front page of the Daily News.  My cousins later said they were scared to death that they would be orphans during that night.

For part of his time in FDNY, Uncle Ed was Chief of Combustibles Research and wrote the first FDNY manual on fire behavior of different materials.

My Katrina Story

Last year, I was digging through a box of CDs to see if there was anything worth looking at and found my Powerpoint that I put together to present my Katrina experience to the DART team (Thousand Oaks Disaster Assistance Response Team, to which I belonged for 5 years).  It's 45 MB due to the pictures and the snippets of text were just reminders for me of the stories.  So here goes.

Monica Buckhout was the Ventura County American Red Cross Emergency Coordinator and one of the founders of DART and was still a member of DART.  When Katrina hit, she asked DART for volunteers.  Eight of us went for the one-day intensive ARC training about a week after Katrina hit.  Three of us ended up going.  I went home and told my shocked family that I was going.  I went into work and told them I was taking vacation.  Took out the ARC list and started packing...geez 3 days worth of water?  That was like 32 lbs.  I grabbed an army sleeping bag from ARC's warehouse.  I put the supplies in a duffel bag and other stuff in a backpack, ham radio, cell phone, soap, TP, chargers, power strip, etc.  I got my orders to fly to Alexandria, LA on the 17th. The chapter in Alexandria would get me transportation to Baton Rouge to be a supervisor of who knows what.  I would figure it out when I got there. 

9/17/05 Day 1 - I got up at 4am to catch my flight.  I found some other ARC volunteers from Ventura on the plane.  We landed in Alexandria after a change in Dallas.  Dallas was full of guardsmen, ARC folks and nurses, started to get a taste of the stories.  Once in Alexandria, I tried to get a car - none in the whole airport. I tried to call the chapter HQ - phone number I had was out of service.  Called Washington, D.C. HQ.  They somehow found someone to pick me up. 

Got to the chapter to find out it was only five blocks away inside the airport (former Air Base) at the armory.  Gun ports on the windows, vaults for weapons, but it was well suited and even had a washer, dryer and kitchen. The place was empty but for the 4 of us volunteers since it was around 6 pm.  There was a dorm set up, so the three women slept in there and I took a big office with a cot.

Around 11 pm the phone rang and it was a cop.  He said he had some folks he needed to take to a shelter...so I said okay...whatever. 

Day 2 I got up the next morning; some folks drift in, food arrives, and they interview us to see what our skills were.  I had just finished my EMT a week before I left LA and I told them about that and my DART training, management experience, having owned a preschool, etc.   So they say, ”Heck, you can manage a shelter, they won't miss you in Baton Rouge.”  Okay, I'll try anything, envisioning some church or school gym.   I grab my stuff and a director drives me out to the shelter - the Alexandria Coliseum.  I met the staff, the director doesn't introduce me as the shelter manager and there were already two of them there, a bit fried, but seemingly effective and certainly had more ARC training than I did.   I spent most of the day shadowing one while the other slept since he covered swing. 

 
 
 

I found out that the deputy that called, came to the shelter with a van full of ex-cons, all chained up and in jumpsuits.  He dropped them off at the front of the shelter and unshackled them, and the existing residents went nuts.  The shelter manager scrounged up some changes of clothes and put them up in the annex building - an exhibition hall where the dining area was also set up.  It was a good- sized building, probably 7000 sq ft or so.  We integrated the cons into the shelter slowly that day.  I found a pill container from one named Johnell.  It was Haldol and the container was empty.  Great - a schitzo with no meds left.  One of the other cons was named Michael...real handsome guy in his 20s, just picked up for drunk driving or something low level like that.

I sat down for lunch and this guy in a wheelchair with a huge surgical scar across his bald head was sitting with us.  He didn't need the wheelchair, but insisted that he did and made the staff push him around.  He was a total lunatic.  Meanwhile I was taking notes about conditions, procedures, schedules, building hazards.  We started cleaning the annex after lunch.  One of the staff we sent off to move the comfort kits off the shelter floor into a locked closet disappears for quite a while. Kids had been getting into the kits and spraying shaving cream all over.  Later, I worked with him and his buddy to stack some broken cots in the shelter I found out he had just started working a week before for the City of Santa Barbara and they allowed staff to go to Katrina. He looked at it like a vacation from work and put about as much effort into it as that implies. Having worked with many city government employees, I didn’t think too much of his work ethic to start with, and he proved my biases correct.

Some FEMA guys show up - firemen from North Carolina, asking if we need anything.  I went over the list of building issues, but they can't help with that.  So I ask, “How about some ice then?”  They could handle that.  I had a debit card, but I couldn't get it to work, so I had to go back to HQ.  I borrowed a rental car that was checked out to the shelter and made a trip to Home Depot to get yellow hazard tape.  When I got back to the shelter, I taped off the stairwells to the grandstands in a feeble attempt to keep people out.  At this point hurricane reports on the TV in the annex showed Rita 30 hrs from Key West.  That was no big alarm for us.  The lunatic started causing a fuss over something and we had the cops haul him away.  

Two staff members and one local volunteer were MIA. Finally, I got to a cot in the dorm - two private connected rooms in the Coliseum, around 1 am   Last cot available was right next to the door.  I just threw the sleeping bag on top of me.  The AC was cranked up full blast because it was not intended for continuous use.  Its design was to cool the place down for events; there was no thermostat. It was either freeze or swelter.  A couple of hours later, I woke up shivering from the cold coming through the bottom of the cot.  I found an airplane blanket I had taken from the plane and lined the cot with it.  About 3:30 am, two MIA volunteers come into the dorm.  I’m not sure if they had been drinking, but it was still awfully late and the ringleader was the one who had disappeared earlier.  He and one of the shelter managers had gotten into it before I got there about the manager giving access to the shelter to a reporter and the volunteer caused him some trouble over it.

Day 3 Up at 6. Make breakfast, met with the shelter manager about the two clowns coming in at 3:30.  We roust them out of bed, tell them to pack and go back to HQ.  We found the local volunteer and threw her out too, since it seemed she would just try to befriend some new out of town volunteers who didn’t know her, and drag them out for partying. I worked on some staff lists and we held a staff meeting.  The director who originally drove me to the Coliseum came from HQ. He pulled out the better of the two shelter managers and reassigned him without me knowing.  I was not sure what those two clowns told them at HQ, but a short while later they show up again.  I ask the better of the two, "Do you have a car?" He says "Yeah."  I say "Take this useless motherfucker back to HQ and I don't want to see either of you back here or I'll have the cops haul you off for trespassing."  They leave.  Now I had the shelter manager phone, and I call HQ and gave them a pretty strong tirade for sending them back.  So I guess now I was really in charge. 

Started a routine of giving the residents evening updates, instructions, rule reminders using the PA system with a microphone. Later that evening, a young teen takes off in his mother's car.  Cops get him and bring him back..turns out another 13 year old girl in the shelter from a real bayou backwoods family tried to seduce him and he got scared.  Pretty sure the father had been abusing the girl.  That night the Saints game was on so we kept the annex open late for the fans.  While I'm over there, one of the staff comes in and says someone is drinking, drunk and smoking in the shelter.  I go over, grab a couple cops on the way and throw the guy out.  His son-in-law later calls to find out why he couldn't stay and sounded like he'd had enough of the guy.  Obviously, I couldn't tell him, but he guessed anyway.  Had this other guy, Robert who had been separated from his wife.  Don't remember how we did it but we found her in Alabama and sent him on a bus with the help of the Baptists donating the fare the next day.

Day 4  The staff was clicking this morning and I was glad, though we’d be short handed, that I pulled out the bad apples.  It seemed no one was sorry to see them go.  I met with the Coliseum building manager.  I found out we didn't have a contract to use the building and he didn't know how he was getting reimbursed for the extra AC, maintenance, lost event income.  I left and went down to Police Jury (Parish seat) and meet with some government jackass who had the contract. 

While I'm there, a FEMA meeting was starting up, so I went in and met the Fire Chief and Police Chief and bunch of others.  There really was nothing else presented that was useful for me at the meeting, just about reimbursements to city departments.  Before I left, I overheard one guy in the men’s room talking to another - both young black guys, "Not everyone spends time in jail."  Guess his friend had a limited circle of friends.

I went back to the shelter and found out they were evacuating Lake Charles and that 1800 people were coming.  I look at the shelter and it is a mess with busted cots, occupied cots in no particular arrangement, except by family groups, overflowing trash barrels.  Nothing was set up for new arrivals and now I was short 3 staff and had just have enough to keep the kitchen, clinic and front desk operating.   Some volunteer from Bunky, LA comes in and starts raving about the lack of facilities and supplies at the shelter in Bunky. It sounded like a campground with rundown cabins, no showers, and outhouses...I think some was exaggeration from what I heard a few months later from another volunteer. But he looked pretty burned out.  I didn’t realize how soon I’d be like that.

I was still thinking about how to get the shelter ready for all these people, and the cell phone rings and it was Father Jose from the local parish, who I'd met sometime in the last two days when he stopped by.  He says, “Hey John do you need some help over there?” “Holy cow, do I need help!”  In no time, a bus load of Catholic nuns and brothers rolls up and they start cleaning cots, clearing out trash, setting cots up, and in no time at all we were ready for Lake Charles.  Later, I was making the rounds and this resident, Teddy, a barber, had set up shop in one of the alcoves and was selling haircuts. He brought a big power strip and had all his clippers plugged in.  He was wearing his blue barber smock and had his drapes out for the customers, the whole deal.  He probably got more customers in one day than he’d get in a week anywhere else.  Another girl was selling Afro-braiding nearby.

Got an idea later and called Countrywide’s purchasing department and asked them to donate some old PCs for the shelter.  Took a while but they shipped them out.  I found some letterhead and gave them their documentation on the donation, like I had the authority.  Then something happened that no one told me about; a truck from the local hospital shows up with a mountain of our cleaned blankets, so now we have a fresh supply and put them on the empty cots.  I find out from the driver that it was a weekly service they were doing for the shelter.  Later that bayou family gets into it and father beats daughter.  Took census -only 155 people left, Rita is a Cat 2 and headed for TX.  Updated the logbook with the day’s events and in comes a couple looking for a place to rack for the night.  I check them in and give them a couple cots and tuck them in, then go to bed myself.  Found the cots busted the next day and them gone.  I realized that you can’t sit in the middle of the cots on that leg, you have to sit between the legs or the middle one breaks.

Day 5 Baton Rouge calls.  They are sending debit cards finally.  That has been real sore spot with the residents.  Debit cards show up by FedEx in a cardboard box, in no particular organization and about $8MM worth of cards with the pin numbers.  I get my other manager to take them to chapter HQ. Father Jose sends his shock troops over again to augment our worn out staff.  We’re only getting about 22 chronic cases at the clinic, but with only 155 people, that seems like a high percentage.  I was getting all kinds of misinformation from HQ about arrivals of new residents, supplies, just about everything.  I sent over a list of needed supplies to handle the influx from Rita.  Pointless, got nothing.  Finally get the word that the Lake Charles Coliseum shelter is packing up and coming to us.  Get the staff together and reorganize along ICS – Planning, Administration, Operations, Logistics. 

We start working with the cops to handle the influx, get the registration desk set up for the new arrivals, build a queue path with chairs for barriers.  450 residents show up from Lake Charles.  Cops give them amnesty on the buses and wand each person as they get off the bus. Anyone dumb enough not to leave their drugs and weapons on the bus got hauled off.  About 50 Lake Charles shelter staff show up and want dinner…at 10 pm.  My staff reopens the kitchen and after eating the LC staff go to the back of the annex for a meeting, leaving their mess for my wiped out crew to clean up.  I get in their faces about it, but they bolt for their buses and take off for their staff shelter.  I go back to the Coliseum and ask the new arrivals to please bed down quickly and quietly.  One of our idiot local volunteers breaks out the air mattresses and blowers and lets the new arrivals start them up at midnight.  That really went over big with the existing residents who were trying to sleep.  So now my staff hate the LC staff and the old residents hate the new ones, who were mostly poor folks from New Orleans, but staying at the Lake Charles shelter after Katrina.

One guy, Connell is refusing to come into the shelter.  He is sitting outside with his clothes in plastic bags and the cops are ready to haul him away for vagrancy.  It turns out that he had been released from jail in Lake Charles and was living at the shelter there. He was going to Walmart every day in Lake Charles to try to find his wife because he knew she lived somewhere in Lake Charles and shopped at WalMart, but he had no idea where she moved.  Turns out that there were two Walmarts in Lake Charles and he had been going to one and she to the other.  When the shelter got the order to evacuate, Connell went to get his glasses fixed and while he was gone, his wife showed up at the shelter looking for him.  Later that night, just as they are boarding the buses to leave Lake Charles, one of the volunteers remembers to tell Connell that his wife had been there.  He refuses to get on the bus.  He gets threatened by the cops that he can’t stay, so he got on the bus.  We try to get as much info as we can out of him.  I put some folks on the phones and somehow we got a hold of his mother in law who knew where his wife was.  We get them on the phone and one of the Lake Charles residents, who came in a car to our place, volunteered to drive him back that night to Lake Charles.  Big reunion when he got there from what the guy who drove him said, whole family was waiting up for them.  Another late night for me.

Day 6 – Lake Charles residents turn the Coliseum into a shithole. Coliseum maintenance guy is ready to quit.  Rubbers and needles in the grandstands…all kinds of other crap.  Lake Charles staff show up, but really aren’t yet ready to work and my staff still pissed at them.  Their shelter manager comes in and tries to take over…not happening, so he disappears.  Dept of Social Svcs had started sending a volunteer over to help at the front desk, but every day we got a new one and had to retrain them.  Plus they were driving from 80 miles away.  Called the DSS manager and thanked him and told them we didn’t need them.  Now that we had some extra staff, I assigned a couple to organizing kids activities.  

On a separate note, one kid, clowning around, jumps off a stairwell and busts his head open, badly, bleeding, semiconscious.  EMTs treat him, and we send him off in an ambulance. We got a couple mental health workers and they started working with the local schools to get the kids enrolled.  Then the FEMA ice showed up…a whole tractor trailer full.  The driver says he has to stay to keep it running. One of the new residents complains about the feral cats running around the place.  Her kid has asthma, so I call out Animal Control and they put out traps.   Got my staff together and made new supervisor assignments and lay out some rules.  Communicate the rules over the loudspeakers that night.  National Guard troop of 6 assigned to us, so I have them patrol the grandstands at night.  Had a prostitution ring busted that night.  I keep getting calls for Michael, the former inmate, from his wife.  Tonight is the 4^th one and I haven’t seen him in a couple days, so I leave a note on his cot. 3 weeks since Katrina hit.

Day 7 – I got all staff together and assigned teams. One team from Lake Charles is a traveling disaster road show of what looks like a bunch of dropouts, but they like swing shift, so I assign them to that.  Turns out they are useless, but at least they keep an eye on things, cover the front desk at night, and their leader seems to know how to work ARC logistics to get stuff.  FEMA ice trailer is gone; City sent it away.  Go figure.

One of the 10 yr old kids comes up to me and says “Mr John, I want to do some work!”  My heart just jumped out of my chest and I told him I’d make him my deputy and pulled out a VC Sheriff’s Dept sticker badge and stuck it on him.  Next thing I know. I have 10 more kids that want to be deputies.  So I put them to work mopping and sweeping.  By now, Rita is coming for sure and so is half of Texas.  I call up the Fire Chief and ask if we have to be concerned about the Coliseum flooding since everything is flat and there was just a curb between us and everything else. I figured we might have to sandbag the entrances. The Chief puts me in touch with the City Engineer who assures me it never had flooded. HQ brings out buses, since we are the first big shelter they hit coming from the west. Some are taken to other shelters; some to the airport and put on planes.  Meet some cool folks coming in from TX.

 We are full by 8 pm.  The other shelters in Alexandria are full by 10:30 and people are still coming.  I was standing in the annex and one of the former inmates Chris, who has been pitching in says, “John you gotta let them in.”  So I call HQ and see if we can use the annex.  HQ calls back and says to give each person 16 sq ft.  Chris gets some of the other former inmates together and we get the last 40 or so cots available at the Coliseum over to the annex and set them up.  I grab a newly arriving family and give them a choice spot (next to a wall with a power outlet, behind a partition) in exchange for their help.  Get some staff over to set up a registration line and we bring them in.  Grab a bullhorn and tell the new arrivals the rules and to bring in anything they have to line the floor and pile on top to keep warm due to the AC.  We pack another 450 people in.  One woman comes in that must’ve weighed over 600 lbs.  She can barely walk. She starts to get on a cot and I stop her and send her and family over to the Special Needs shelter.  She would have crushed that flat. Another woman comes in with her mother in a wheelchair. The daughter goes to sleep and leaves her mother in the wheelchair.  I blast her and get someone to give up their cot for the mother and get some staff to help get the mother into the cot. 

People from TX are showing up with horses, dogs, cats, turtles and birds.  I assign a staff member who is a veterinary assistant to animal director; she’s thrilled.  Fortunately, we have a barn for the rodeos that appear at the Coliseum, so we put the animals up there.  Two women camp out in a pen with some pedigree pups they are transporting to new owners.  Winds and rain start picking up.  Get on the PA system and warn the residents about the storm and what measures to take.  Have my logistics manager break out flashlights and light sticks.  We mark the Coliseum floor with light sticks to show the way to the bathrooms and showers.  I head to bed and find a staff member half out of her mind with hypothermia in the hall.  Some residents were complaining about the lack of coffee in the Coliseum so she went out in the rain to the annex to get some.  I grabbed her some dry clothes and threw her into our private bathroom to take a hot shower and change.   She was also an epileptic who had already had one seizure.  I helped her get into a cot, even though she was a local volunteer. I didn’t want her trying to get home in the storm.

Day 8 – Wake up to no power, and although I was supposed to sleep while other manager took the day shift, I overheard noise about the kitchen and part of the annex being full of shit.  I got dressed and ran over there and decide that it’s a hazmat situation…2” of crap in the kitchen and bathrooms.  With the loss of power, we lost the sewer pumps from the annex, which then acted like a plug and everything backed up thru the floor drains.  Call the fire dept, but all they have is an engine…no help.  Staff set up dip tanks with chlorine for everyone to step in before they entered the sleeping area and the staff worked to clean up the mess, but the kitchen would have to be gutted eventually. I held a staff meeting and got everyone ready for the hurricane. HQ came over and bitched me out for calling the fire department for the mess. Apparently the news media watch the 911 call logs and she didn’t want it out that we had a crap problem.

I sent some staff to sleep in the annex so they wouldn’t have to go outside.  I found a bullhorn and made some announcements for the residents, instructions about movement in the dark, meals, etc.. We moved everything out of the lobby due to the big glass doors in front, and taped up doors and windows with duct tape.  Winds up to 70.  Rain coming sideways. HQ calls about possible tornadoes. I had gone back to the annex to make announcements there. I look out the back of the annex and there are a whole mess of RVs and a carnival caravan.  I go out and start banging on RV doors telling the occupants to come to the shelter due to the tornadoes.  Find Bobby Braun and her invalid aunt, cousin and husband in one very tricked out RV.  They are all rigged with NOAA radios and walkie talkies – they hand me one and say they can’t move the aunt; she looks like she’s in her 90s, on oxygen and laid out on the couch.  Bobby will keep me posted on the weather and every half hour gave me updates. 

I go back to the Coliseum and there is a small portable generator that appeared out of nowhere with an open gas tank and a bunch of idiots smoking downwind from it.  Took care of that.    A volunteer starts driving folks from the annex in an ARC rented van to the Coliseum to use the facilities. Then they realized we volunteers aren’t allowed to due to insurance liability, so someone gets the bright idea of letting one of the residents drive the van back and forth.  Pretty soon, no van, no resident. Water pressure goes out, now no operating toilets in the Coliseum.  Now had to start bucket brigades to flush as there was just enough water still coming out of the tap, but not enough pressure for the commercial toilets.  Put the kids on mop duty and they grab mops and keep the bathroom floors dry so no one falls.  Later the kids come through again on their own and start passing out water bottles because the Coliseum was stifling.  With no kitchen, my food supervisor arranges with HQ for MREs for dinner.  We get the MREs and find out they have chemical heaters packaged with them.  Took me a half hour to figure out how to heat one up without burning myself, and we decide it’s too dangerous to hand them out, so we take apart 2000 MREs and remove the heaters and pass them out to be eaten cold…for every meal.  Hurricane passes, I that announcement. A big oil rigger came up, gave me a bear hug and thanked me for keeping everyone safe.  He wanted to give me $500, so I told him to donate it to ARC.  Bobby and her husband come over to the shelter to pitch in with passing out MREs. Great folks, and I keep in touch with them.  Head for the dorm and I complain that I can’t fit into my sleeping bag, even though it is supposed to be for someone much taller.  A volunteer sitting on the cot next to me points out that it was inside out!  I hadn’t even looked at it that closely.  Much better sleeping that night.

Day 9 – Half my original crew is rolling off today, lots of goodbyes and pictures.  Have a note about a gift, but I can’t remember what that was about.  I had to do a bunch of staff evaluations before they left.  Then one of the Coliseum workers got word that the water was contaminated due to no power at the water company, so no showers.  One of the EMTs goes crazy splashing straight bleach around and raving about food contamination from the crap over at the annex.   We finally got porta-potties for the annex.  I go with that one staff member drive out to her house to see what damage Rita did. Mostly trees down, but the residents got out early with their chainsaws and cleared the roads. 

We are driving back and she says in a thick drawl “I din’t know Joe’s job was all that hard”  And I say JOE?  He’s just a maintenance guy.  And she says no not Joe, YOOO OWWLLL’S job..Laughed for an hour over that. 

Get back and the cops busted a drug ring. Then one of the mental health workers runs to me and says the cops have Johnell.  I go out front and there is Johnell, half wrapped around a pole wobbling and waving his arms with four cops in front of him with nightsticks.  I run out and get between them and ask the cops what they are doing.  They say he’s under the influence…(this the schizo guy)…I say under the influence of what??  You don’t know if he’s on too much meds, off his meds or what.  Then they say he’s combative.  I laugh and say you are coming at him like a pack of wolves.  You arrest him and he’ll be right back here tomorrow.  Let him back in; we’ll take him to the clinic. A couple hours later they catch him dealing his meds, I say, now you got something to book him on. 

There was another guy, kind of slow, but REALLY big, at least 6’ 9”, 550 lbs, named Ray.  Someone stole his cell phone one night. Then one of  the mental health guys the next night went to wake him up to give him meds and Ray almost clocked him with a flashlight.  Mental health guys wanted him out of there. It seemed to me that they should have been able to handle him, so I made them allow him to stay.  They didn’t like idea that much.  Couple other incidents between him and them, but I talked to Ray and didn’t have any more trouble with him. 

Michael’s wife calls me again.  She thinks he is shacking up with someone.  No surprise…the guy’s a stud.  I tell her, “Look you can hardly blame him, stuck in jail, then coming to this dump and some woman offers him good food, warm house and comfortable bed.” and she calms down a bit.  Then later, Michael finally shows up, I hand him the phone and tell him to call his wife.  They make up and we get him a bus ticket out of there for him to go home.  One of the other residents who showed up was a transsexual…not fully baked.  He had only been taking the hormones, so he had breasts and a penis.  He didn’t want to shower in the men’s shower because they were gawking at him, and the women sure didn’t want him in their shower.  The women didn’t want him in the shelter period and were spreading stories that him and his boyfriend were having sex in the shelter.  So while the mental health worker and I are talking to him, the cops come over and arrest his boyfriend for stealing someone sneakers.  Half the problem solved.  So we worked it out that he’d come and get the key for our shower so he.she..whatever could be alone.

Don’t exactly remember what was going on, but I have a note that the residents were complaining about the snacks.  I forget what that was about.  Staff relations are humming along really well.  We had a real big family come in who were staying at a local school, but had no food, so we added them to our list and stocked them up.  I was really hoping they’d move in and bring some stability to the floor of the Coliseum, with all the assholes we had in there.  Finally, after a few hours, I was able to make some space for them, but couldn’t find them.  Tried to find them by having another volunteer drive me to wherever the school was, but she wasn’t very good at finding her way around and we missed it.  My nerves were pretty shot by now from the stress and lack of sleep and I started to fall apart over this and the Ray issue, since the mental health workers were still busting my chops, and claiming that Ray took a crap out back of the Coliseum.  Pulled it back together and we went back. Watched one of the swing shift crew blow off a resident who asked for some info that was right at the kid’s fingertips in the phone book in front of her.  I got pissed and pointed out where the info was and made her get it.  I started formulating a policy that I passed along to all the staff that anyone that comes up to them with a problem gets their attention. If they can’t help the person they are to find someone who can, because otherwise it just kept coming back to me and by then usually I was handling a personal issue for someone every three minutes and couldn’t focus on my regular stuff.

Day 10 Cops arrested a child molester in the shelter last night.  Never got the details from the swing shift, but there was a kid involved.  Not having heard a peep out of HQ about the debit cards and tired of making excuses, started talking to the Natl Guard captain and some national ARC staff who got stranded with us by Rita about how we could pass them out securely. Found out later that HQ had put them in their vault with a couple people to try to organize the cards.  National staff pack up and leave. They were a great help and really nice.  Mental health guy sees I’m starting to fall apart and recommends a day off.  Then some wacky big old hayseed volunteer comes in from another shelter and recites a poem he made up about Katrina.  He seemed pretty crazed and after he left, the mental health guy say, ”that could be you.”  



I go out of our dorm and sit at the table for the diabetics and special diet folks having breakfast and there’s a woman there I’d seen who had a nasty facial tic.  So I strike up a conversation and turns out she’d been a reporter in the Middle East for a long time, grew up in CA, travelled a lot.  She had an affliction called Meag’s Dystonia, and was scheduled for surgery in Baton Rouge to have it fixed when Katrina hit.  Fascinating person. 




Started to get involved in client issues and then the mental health guy tells me to get out of there.  So we go do some laundry in town, go visit another shelter, run by the mayor’s wife in an old Walmart.  She made it a showplace and each family had real king sized beds and dressers - about 300 sq ft of space per family.  What a difference compared to our shithole.
 


 

Went back to shelter later and packed up.  We had a motel room that people took turns using, so it was my turn. Started walking over with my gear and one of the guys, Steve, the crazed EMT, calls me and says he picking me up.  Told him not to bother, but he ended up at the shelter anyway, but I was already gone.  Called my daughter and gave her the rundown of everything…never talked so fast..was still so keyed up.  Got to the motel and had to wait on the bench for Steve to come back with a key. 

Of course the motel was full and this well dressed guy pulls up who was evicted from his hotel room because the mgmt said he was there too long.  Turns out they didn’t have the right to do that, but they already gave away his room, now he couldn’t find anywhere to stay.  I started to tell him about the shelter, but realizing it really wasn’t where he belonged…just told him I couldn’t recommend it.  He really didn’t know what else to do and I was out of answers, so I just sat there and cried for a while.  Then Steve came back, I got settled in the room.  We were pretty much bouncing off the walls telling stories about the last week and other stupid but funny stuff we’d done in the past.  When he got tired, I called my boss and one of the DART team members and told them stories of the past week. 

Day 11. Steve was packing out to go home, so I drove him over to HQ for paperwork, then to the terminal.  He walks up to the terminal’s only ticket counter in this dinky airport and the counter agent puts up a closed sign and tells him he’s too late.  It’s literally 100 feet from the counter to the plane.  So he gets pissed, but books the next flight.  We have ARC shirts on that one of the volunteers had ordered, so a woman behind us asks if we can help her.  Turns out she’s a nurse and trying to find the special needs shelter.  So we take the nurse to the special needs shelter and we decide to go to lunch at a restaurant in the airport that used to be the AF officers club.  Really nice.  We’re the only ones there so the manager, Fred, comes over and sits with us.  And I say” hey Fred, can you round up some bakers in town and get me some cake and cookies for the kids at the shelter.”  He says, “Come back at 4.” Take Steve back to the airport, and go to HQ with a new idea and plan.  Grab some stuff there for it.  Picked up some new staff and told them a bit of what they missed.  Got some of the staff together and let them in on the plan for a party for the kids who volunteered, went back to the restaurant and got the cakes and cookies.  Went to our office in the annex and made up certificates for the kids.  Happened to see Leslie in the lobby and sat down next to her.  Asked if anything relaxes her tic, and she says, “I like to sing.”  I ask, “Like what do you sing?”  She says, “Sondheim”, so I say “Let’s hear it.”  She starts singing, absolutely pitch perfect and her whole face relaxes. Amazing.

After dinner, I got on the PA system and told everyone we were having a celebration.  Got all the kids up to the front and announced them to the people and what they’d done to help.  Each one got a commemorative poster, ARC necklace, and their certificates.  We hoisted each one up on our shoulders as we announced them.  Lots of fun.  Then called up Leslie to sing and she belted out an aria by Handel.  Amazing again.  Then all the kids came out to the lobby for their cake and cookies.

 Spent the rest of the night orienting the new staff.  Got some real pros this time.  Operations managers and such.

Day 12 Stayed at motel last night.  Another shelter manager arrives, but I don’t see her much after that. Not sure what she was going to do, but ended up assigning someone else in her place.  Worked on turnover documentation.  Noticed that the cops and the National Guard were gone, just a couple sheriffs around I didn’t know.  Worked the front desk, trained new staff.  Got involved with this woman in a motorized wheelchair who wanted another battery but the chair company was supposedly giving her the runaround. I got on the phone with the company, but it turned out she hadn’t been paying her bill to them, but did seem to have enough to smoke a pack a day, so I let her know I wasn’t about to pressure them.
 

Then this guy comes in and says he’d like to see his people.  I thought he had relatives there.  Told him I couldn’t actually tell him who was inside.  He then tells me he’s a preacher from Lake Charles and they used to let him in the shelter to (probably shake down) preach to the residents.  I told him I couldn’t let him do that and that not everyone had the same training and don’t realize it’s not allowed. He and I exchange some heated words after he started getting huffy.  Then trying to diffuse the situation, I extend my hand and say I’m sorry I can’t let him in but that he’s welcome to set up in the lobby like the Baptists or talk to anyone he likes in the lobby or outside.  He grabs my hand and pulls me in and says,” I’ll be in there by the time I’m done with you.” I tell him to get out of the shelter and send someone off to get a sheriff to chase him off.  Sheriff talks to him, comes back in and says he’s a troublemaker. 

 Then the CFC PC’s arrive and I get a hold of the ham club guy who’s been maintaining our network and ask him to bring some guys over to set them up.  This way, people could look for jobs and other assistance on the net.  Finish up the staff realignment, gave out some more promotions.  One of the residents doesn’t sleep at night, so he’s been patrolling the parking lot at night looking for stuff going on.  Keyed the cops into some people doing drugs out there.  So we gave him a Red Cross shirt.  Chris got picked up by the former shelter manager who had been going around setting up shelters for staff. Chris got out of the shelter, was able to be more productive and was absolutely ecstatic.  Totally forgot about the preacher, but called HQ later and told them about the incident.

 Day 13 – Knocking on the motel door first thing.  HQ director and two other guys.  Tell me not to go to the shelter, but directly to HQ.  One of the guys stays with me while I get ready.  Apparently, the preacher got on the radio and was claiming I assaulted him and all sorts of other crap out religious intolerance of the Red Cross.  So they didn’t want me showing up there.  I spent the day at HQ schmoozing with the staff, comparing commemorative T=shirts.  I called the staff at Coliseum with instructions. I also called environmental control to see how the staff should dispose of all those chemical heaters, probably about 30,000 of them now. I didn’t want the staff to throw them in the dumpster in the rain, because the heaters would all start cooking off (the chemicals are activated by water).  So the engineer says that they are hazmat and I’d have to hire an Army contractor to dispose of them.  So I ask what do you do with the used ones.  He says then they are just solid waste and we could throw them in the regular garbage. 

I call the shelter manager and tell him to throw all the heaters out in the parking lot in the rain and let them cook off, then throw them out.  Went back to the motel and packed up the rest of my stuff, drove around the back of the annex, snuck in and finished a little paperwork and went back to HQ.  Met with the chapter head. Then I called up some staff at the Coliseum to meet me out front of the Coliseum and drove over there. I brought them back to HQ and turned over the car and motel key to them and gave them instructions on who should receive them.  Treated the newbies to tales from the shelter and met up with the folks I’d arrived with who had gone to Baton Rouge to do almost nothing there.  So glad I didn’t go there.  Went over to the bowling alley at the airport.  Full of soldiers, ARC volunteers, and nurses.  Had a beer with some I knew, including the one from the airport.

Day 14- Went out for a walk, got breakfast at the airport terminal. Went back, did laundry.  I worked in the lobby greeting clients, goofing around with them, and directing them to assistance.  Next day they were going to be disbursing the debit cards finally, so I helped them get ready for that setting up work areas for the people responsible for each group of 3 last name letters.  Hung out with friends for the night and packed up.

Day 15. People started lining up at 3am for the debit cards.  At 7 am we started lines outside the gun ports – really just windows with bars and an opening on the bottom for passing weapons/debit cards through.  8:30 the cards started to be handed out.. Nice to see that finally happening.  Went over to the special needs shelter to say goodbye to the nurse and see about free Hep B vaccinations.  Too early for vaccinations.  So went back to HQ, said goodbyes and hiked to the terminal.  Flew home and next day located Leslie’s surgeon and got word to her.

 When I got back to work, Richard Jones, the Countrywide CIO, stopped by to let me know he had HR credit all my vacation time back.  He then sat down and asked me how it was.  I don’t think he was prepared for what was coming, but he sat through an hour of stories.

Some of my crazy career

Sometimes I feel like the Forrest Gump of project managers with some of the situations in which I end up being a bit player. This latest project is about the Office of the Controller of the Currency trying to prove that 9 major banks screwed  over the public by violoating foreclosure procedures.  The banks are scrambling to avoid $400MM in fines each if the OCC finds them liable.  I'm at Bank of America and we are spending money hand over fist to build out our computer systems to allow over 2000 loan reviewers look over every one of the 1.4 million foreclosures done between 2009 and 2010.  All the legal documents, fees, correspondence, filings, etc.

Other projects that prove my point...Congress coming down on NASA because NASAs bookkeeping is such a shambles they don't know where they spent money, so KPMG tries to build a common accounting system for them.  NASA couldn't decide on a common chart of accounts that all the centers agree to....project fails, KPMG loses millions on the project.

Then with KPMG, none of California counties have a child support enforcement system so we help Cty of San Diego build a great one, but because they are a republican dominant county, the state throws it out for a piece of shit built by Kern Cty, Managed building part of the first integrated justice system in California only to watch KPMG get screwed out of $2MM of billings by the D.A.

Feds come down on LAPD with the consent decree after the Rodney King and Ramparts scandals, so KPMG tries to build them a profiling data warehouse. Two years later LAPD makes a big announcement that they have a system for capturing the racial make up of witnesses and victims - a 2x3 postcard the cops fill out on the scene.

BAC takes over CFC and I help move all of BACs mortgages onto CFC's systems, then move CFCs systems into BACs data centers. Just for our department - had to bring up over 400 servers in 9 months, some with high performance clustering technology and several multi-terabyte databases.

Helped facilitate the merger of the municipal and superior courts in CA, thereby promoting a bunch of hack muni judges into the Superior Courts when I was at Deloitte. Spent an hour next to Grey Davis on a flight to Sacramento, thinking he seemed really capable and sincere. Boy, was I fooled!

Implemented part of a network for Western Union Telegraph in their last dying grasp to make money out of telex before faxing and email destroyed their market.   Their concept for email was to put terminals in peoples houses that would print the email in the post office, where it would be delivered by the postman.

Managed the international computing department for SPNB and listened to an international banking rep explain how they had to keep lending money to Latin America that they'd never be able to pay back, or else he wouldn't have a job. That logic brought down SPNB and almost BAC.

Worked for Bankers Trust across the street from the south tower...ultimately BT was bought by Deutsche Bank and the building heavily damaged in 9/11 21 years later.

Took one of the last rides on Angel's Flight in LA, the day that the brakes failed and a guy was killed.

Watched the KPMG Consulting partners cheer their impending IPO and two weeks later find themselves broke when the stock tanks.

Worked on an implementation of Steve Job's NeXt system for the LA County Sheriff's...Fail.

Worked in Quality Control on a project at Deloitte for State of Arizona's medicare system, after spending $18MM, Deloitte had delivered one of 10 or so modules and decided, that since they were only going to collect $12MM on the project, that it was time to fold their tent and go home.

Worked on an audit for the Bicycle Club Casino where we found that the IT manager used the payroll system to skim FICA withholdings into his paycheck.

Worked in a building downtown LA that was shot up overnight in the LA Riots.

Worked on a project for Dept of Corrections for CA and visited Corcoran prison to interview guards about procedures. The following week, FBI busts the guards for staging gladiator fights between the inmates. (Sirhan Sirhan and Charlie Manson are held there too.)    In the annual report on the state of the prisons they actually stated that they had used prisoners to code the Inmate Trust Accounting system and one of the inmates of course coded in a way to skim money into his account.  Another had not documented anything and after he was released was given a contract to document his code.  Another put a time bomb in his code that crashed the system after his release.  One time they sent a HP Unix server out to a prison and it was put into the warehouse.  When time came to install it, it was missing.  A short while later a lieutenant at the prison called the help desk asking how to boot this strange PC on his desk.  It came with a 20" monitor, so he thought it would make a nice PC for his office.

Worked for the manager at SPNB who Stan Rifkin worked for. Look him up for the public story...here's the real one:
He became a security consultant after he got out.  But, he really wasn't all that clever. All he did, since he had access to the wire transfer room, was try to figure out the calculation for the security code that a branch uses to authorize a money transfer. Then from inside the wire room, called the operators in the wire room and pretended to be a branch manager. He screwed it up the first time and on the second call the operator helped him out and made the transfer. He got screwed in Switzerland when he bought the diamonds and they were worth a lot less than he paid. Then he was dumb enough to come back to the states where the FBI picked him up at the airport. The way they caught him was after the bank discovered they were out of balance, they played back the dictaphone tapes from the wire room phone calls and one of the wire room operators recognized his voice.