“We are the eyes and ears on the ground,” Frank Spears reminds his Red Cross Disaster Assessment Team before leading them into one of many neighborhoods plowed under by the spate of tornadoes that rolled across the South and central Georgia on March 24 and 26.
His six damage assessors are tasked with laying a cornerstone for American Red Cross work that could go on for weeks in West Point, Georgia. These teams track down and digitally document every home that has damage in the little town on the Chattahoochee River in southwest Georgia.
The photographs, addresses, and a brief description of what they see are fed from their smartphones into a database that helps Red Cross responders estimate the amounts and types of help an area needs and set its agenda to provide ongoing support to those most impacted by the storm.
Spears’ team is among the first to show up after local emergency workers and linemen finish their work.
From Louisiana to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, hundreds of Red Cross volunteers and staff members are sent to the largely rural communities ravaged by the storms. They begin offering immediate help by opening shelters and offering food and water while preparing for the long work of rebuilding.
“They are going in while the ground is still warm,” Spears said of his team. He arrived on March 26, the morning after the powerful Saturday night storms flattened a neighborhood north of downtown in the inequitable way that only tornadoes can – scattering everything that was one home across an acre, leaving another house 100 feet away with only a single piece of fascia pulled askew.
“This is mother lode right here,” Spears said, looking over the toppled trees and shattered homes while a few property owners showed up to sift the debris for vestiges of their lives.
There was little even for Kyle Williams to pick through. A home that had been his late grandmother’s and a commercial building from which she ran a florist shop were…
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