"When the Red Cross walked up I knew I could calm down."

by Gordon Williams

It's impossible to know in advance when disaster will strike—or to appreciate the degree of trauma and chaos victims will face when it does.

To Lew Eleanor McNeely, the scene was terrible when she returned from a Sunday morning outing with her 2½-year old granddaughter Angelina in mid-June to find her 10th floor Manhattan apartment engulfed in flames.

Firefighters were focused on battling the blaze; neighbors were themselves in shock and could not help ease her sense of panic and loss. No one was in a position to tell her what to do next. She had no food or diapers for the baby and almost no cash in her purse to buy more. She looked around the disaster scene and found herself alone.

“When you are in the eye of the storm, you need someone to guide and direct you,” she recalled. “But I felt I was on my own.”

Then two disaster responders from the American Red Cross—Cosmina Menghes and Tiara Youmans— arrived on the scene.

“When the Red Cross walked up I knew I could clam down. I knew they would have the answers for me. "It was like the parting of the waters,” Lew Eleanor said. “When they walked up, I knew I could calm down. I knew that someone would have the answers for me.”

Baby Angelina seemed fascinated by the responders’ Red Cross caps. They let Angelina play with one of the caps, which nicely distracted the infant. The crew began the process of registering Lew Eleanor into the system so Red Cross client services caseworkers could provide longer-term assistance. As they took control of the situation, Lew Eleanor felt her own sense of panic and hysteria drain away.

The Red Cross took care of her immediate needs for money to buy baby supplies by issuing a Client Assistance Card—a debit card that she could put to use almost immediately. The damage to the apartment was so great she could not spend the night there. The Red Cross provided her with emergency housing in a clean, safe lodging.

She visited the Red Cross offices in Manhattan and talked to a Red Cross representative about her longer-term needs. Luckily, the managers of her building were able to find her a new apartment almost at once. It helped that she has grown up in the building and that her father had been the building superintendent for 30 years.

It also helped that Lew Eleanor had been a valued tenant in the building—someone very special with a splendid work history and a lifetime filled with accomplishments. She not only spent 25 years teaching classes in adult literacy, but in the evenings she trained other teachers. Since retiring, she said, “I have tried to do everything on my bucket list."

She learned to swim, gave up smoking and taught herself Spanish. Next on the schedule is to travel to the Caribbean.

So the crisis is past and assistance from the Red Cross helped Lew put her life back together again. But there still are important lessons her experience can teach others.

The first is that disaster can strike anyone at any time. Lew Eleanor had spent a joyous day in the park with Angelina. They played in a playground, rode a carrousel, rolled down a grassy hill.

“It was a great, great day,” she said. “We were heading home, all grimy and grassy and sandy, toward what should have been a nap for Angelina and some feet-up rest time for grandma.”

Instead she found her street clogged with fire engines and her apartment in flames.

The second lesson is to be triply careful you are not doing things that could bring disaster to your door.

The night before the fire she had lighted a prayer candle on Saturday night and assumed it had burned itself out by Sunday morning.

But it looks as though the candle had not extinguished itself and was the apparent source of the fire.

“The prayer candle took the apartment,” she said ruefully. “But we weren’t home when the fire began and the baby was never in any danger. That is the real answer to all my prayers.”

Lew Eleanor McNeely—Manhattan

What the Red Cross Means to Me

By Gordon Williams

I've been a Disaster Planning and Response volunteer at the Greater New York Red Cross for the past seven years—six as a disaster responder and the past year as a dispatcher in the Emergency Communications Center. But I’ve been running after fire engines a lot longer than that.

My dad was a newspaperman in Chicago, who couldn’t resist racing to the scene of a hot story. The radio in every car he owned was modified to receive police and fire calls. More than once as a child, I remember being awakened by my dad in the middle of the night and told, “There's a great fire, let's go.”

“Howard, the boy needs his sleep,” my mom would say. “Nonsense,” my dad would answer, and off we would go, driving through the dark toward an orange glow in the sky.

My father knew the men at the local fire house and I spent many Sunday mornings there—dad chatting with the firefighters and me climbing over the apparatus. My favorite perch was the tiller seat—the secondary steering wheel at the back of a hook-and-ladder, used to steer the rig around tight corners.

Chasing Fire Engines for a Living

My first job was as a police reporter on a Chicago newspaper, covering crime and fires. Ever hear of a fire burning 14 days? This one was in a refrigerated warehouse, with cork-insulated walls a foot thick. Day-after-day the fire burned through the cork, one floor after another collapsing until the whole building was a mountain of ruble. I stopped off each morning on my way to work, looking for fresh angles to the story.

The worst fire I ever covered came on the day in 1958 I formally presented an engagement ring to my then-fiancé (now my wife of 53 years). I gave her the ring, put her on a train back to college and went off to cover the Our Lady of Angels fire. The fire had burned through a parochial school on Chicago's West Side, killing 92 children and three nuns. More than a half-century later, the awful images of that day remain vivid in my mind.

My career in journalism went off in a different direction—from reporting on crime and disaster to covering business and global finance I spent 20 years as a writer and editor on Business Week magazine and 13 years as network business correspondent on television and radio for ABC News.

My First Tries at Volunteering

I retired from ABC in 1994 to start my own consulting business. Over the years I got involved in various volunteer activities. For example, I was one of five members of a committee created to bring the mission and message of a big national charity into the 21st century.

All my volunteer work seemed to involve endless meetings that led to reports and recommendations that ultimately never seemed to lead anywhere at all. I spent a lot of time and effort, but never saw anyone receiving any direct benefit from my work.

Volunteering With a Difference

Hurricane Katrina jolted me awake as it did many people. I went to the old Red Cross building on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and signed up for training as a disaster responder. And that opened the door to what for me has been “volunteering with a difference.” I have attended few meetings, written no reports at all. What I have had is countless opportunities to provide direct, face-to-face help to people whose need for help is critical.

Actually my first major response in 2006 is still one of my most memorable—a four-alarm apartment house fire in Queens that left 65 people homeless in 17 non-habitable apartments. It was my third training shift and only the second for Melody, my fellow responder in training. Red Cross supervisors Danny Reyes and Jean Sylla raced upstairs to start the disaster assessments. Melody and I found the only lighted dry spot in the building—the basement laundry room—and started registering clients for Red Cross assistance. We wound up transporting two busloads of clients to a nearby motel.

Hitting the High Points

So what are the high points of seven years as a Red Cross volunteer?

It has been exciting. There’s no telling when a shift begins, what will happen. You might spend the shift at the chapter, never going out. Or you might spend a frantic night, going from one incident to the next. After one very busy night, another responder and I were having a pre-dawn meal in a fast food place in Queens—a late dinner or an early breakfast, we never decided.

Our clothes were damp and smeared with soot. We both gave off a decidedly pungent smell of smoke. The other responder looked at me and said he doubted that anyone else in New York City had spent the evening quite as we had. Not since my days as a working journalist have I experienced the adrenalin rush that some of my Red Cross responses have given me.

I think New York is the greatest city in the world and being a Red Cross volunteer has given me an active and fulfilling role to play in the life of my city. As volunteers we become part of New York in a way few people ever experience. Eight million people live in New York, and we are among those who make a difference.

The Satisfaction of Giving Back

I had a great career. At any given time, fewer than 200 people are correspondents for one of the big broadcast networks. For 13 years, I was one of them. I would like to think my talent accounted for that. The truth is I was blessed with great gobs of sheer good luck—being in the right place at the right time. I caught plenty of lucky breaks and now it’s time to give something to those who aren't as lucky as I was.

And that is the ultimate reward for being a Red Cross volunteer—meeting someone who has just gone through the worst experience of their lives and being able to help. We often get tired and wet and filthy on the job. Sometimes we have to take risks to do a damage assessment. In the end, being the first to offer help to someone who desperately needs help makes it all more than worthwhile.

--Gordon Williams, NY, NY

My Five-Alarm Life: Moving On

By Aabye-Gayle D. Francis-Favilla

Photo: Ian Favilla

They say moving on isn’t easy. Well, they’d be right. My husband and I found ourselves “moving on” quite a lot after the fire in our apartment building. We were effectively nomads for almost a year. Most of our possessions were destroyed and would have to be replaced eventually. But our most pressing need was finding a place to live while our apartment was being rebuilt.

Finding a temporary home was difficult enough, but finding one that could accommodate our indefinite timeline was even more daunting. In fact, we didn’t find one, not just one anyway. It would take four temporary homes (and five moves between them) to fill the time between the fire and our return home.

First we moved in with my brother-in-law who lived walking distance from our Elmhurst, Queens apartment. We stayed with him for just the first two or three nights after the fire. Then we were taken in by two friends in a Union Square, Manhattan apartment with an extra bedroom for a month. And then, just as our time in Union Square was ending, through a friend of a friend, we found a place we could stay in for a few months—a beautiful one-bedroom apartment in Long Island City, Queens. It was time to move again.

With this next move, we got a bit creative. New York City had been inundated with snow, and as a result a good parking spot was hard to find. With alternate side of the street parking rules suspended, I could leave my car parked where it was indefinitely, so I devised a plan to move without moving my car—a plan that would remove the pressure and time-consumption of repeatedly looking for a convenient parking space in a snow-coated city. I decided to leave the car in Union Square until the final leg of the move.

Never underestimate the efficacy of public transportation. That’s how I made the majority of move three: Union Square to Long Island City (LIC). Instead of driving, I took the subway. I packed our stuff into a large, thick garbage bag to keep things clean and dry on the slushy streets, and then I put everything into a shopping cart.

Thankfully, both the Union Square and LIC train stations were a very short walk from their respective apartments. And I didn’t have to negotiate any stairs, because both stations were equipped with elevators. Once on the train I could relax and read for the thirty-minute (or less) ride (instead of dealing with NYC traffic—or drivers), and when I arrived at my destination, I didn’t have to spend time looking for a parking spot. The shopping cart was pretty big, but it still could only hold so much (much less than a carful). So, I had to make a lot of trips back and forth—but thank goodness for unlimited MetroCards!

What an odd first impression we must have made. I can only imagine what the doormen at the LIC apartment thought of us given how we moved in. On day one, they saw me coming in every hour or two with a full garbage bag-lined shopping cart. I must have made at least six or seven trips like that. I imagine I looked like a persistent hobo to them.

That weekend, they saw my husband and me bringing in closetful after closetful of dry-cleaning—everything from suits to undershirts to bed sheets. What they must have thought of that! And in the weeks (and months) that followed, they witnessed us receiving as many as four or five boxes of deliveries on a regular (almost daily) basis. Odder still, they didn’t see us bring in a single piece of furniture until we’d already been there for a month.

The apartment was already furnished with everything but a bed when we moved in. Our insurance company provided us with one, but it took a month for the logistics of that to be resolved. We slept on an air mattress that first month.

It was only later that we befriended the now understandably quizzical doormen and shared our situation: that there had been a fire in our building, that we were living nomadically until our apartment was rebuilt, that almost all of our clothes had gone to the dry-cleaners not because we were pretentious or lazy, but because they had a special process to remove the soot stains and smoke smell, and that all of the deliveries were due to us trying to replace as much as we could—everything from sneakers to shower curtain rings to books.

That Long Island City apartment was an oasis in our nomadic journey. It is where we spent the most time. We were able to grow roots there—however shallow. It almost felt like home. In fact, we thought we were almost home. That it would only be a short matter of time. Oh how wrong we were, but we didn’t know it then. Instead, we moved to Long Island City confident that this was our penultimate stop, and that our next move would take us back home.

As was our time in Union Square, our stay in Long Island City was full of blessings. First and foremost was that we could stay there for almost six months. Having such a long stretch of time there made our lives as a whole feel much less temporary and uncertain. We were able to build a routine and treat it as home—a home we didn’t have to share with anyone. Thanks to the generosity of our renter’s insurance policy, this was an apartment we wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to afford. We enjoyed the amenities that were luxuries to us: a doorman, a balcony, a gym, a view. There were also unexpected sources of entertainment: the pool table in the rec room and the impossible to ignore fights between the couple living next door.

All in all, we were happy. After the fire, everything had felt like it was happening in fast forward. Decisions had to be made, forms had to be filled out, we moved three times in the first two months. But with six months to get comfortable, it felt as though someone had benevolently pressed pause. Now we could find a reasonably paced routine for our lives and just live. We didn’t feel so much like victims anymore. We weren’t home yet, but we were closer. And that proximity made us feel more normal.

Some of our losses were intangible and took a bit longer to recognize, I’ll reflect on those in the next installment of “My Five-Alarm Life.”



“I thank the Red Cross for their availability during this crisis.”

James Clark, Grandview Palace resident

Retired businessman James Clark had just returned to his home at the Grandview Palace condominiums in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y., after a trip to the west coast when the fire alarm went off on April 14.

“It has gone off before so I chose to ignore it,” he said.

Moments later, someone started to pound on Clark’s door, telling him to get out. He grabbed a sweater and ran out.

“The fire was so threatening,” he said. “You could hear the structure collapsing. It was disorienting to see the buildings consumed by the fire and the intensity of the fire. It was a horrific experience.”

The fire destroyed Clark’s home, as well as close to 400 other units in the condo complex.

Clark came to the Red Cross shelter at Sullivan County Community College for help with the paperwork he needed to complete in the wake of the fire.

“I thank the Red Cross for their presence,” he said. “For the help with all the forms I had to fill out, the fact that there’s food available … that’s very helpful, especially when you’ve lost everything.”

My Life in Disaster: Contagion!

Last week I went to see the movie “Contagion,” directed by Steven Soderburgh. It’s a thriller about an airborne virus which causes a pandemic, killing almost everyone who comes into contact with it. In the movie, Kate Winslet, who plays a doctor investigating the virus for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), mentions that we touch our hands to our face two or three thousand times per day. Yes, thousand!

After watching Soderburgh’s quiet, cool focus on how often we are exposed/expose others just by passing a credit card to a cashier, or eating from a bowl of peanuts at a bar, I can’t help but be just a bit compulsive about whose germs I have been or am about to be exposed to myself.

Immediately after seeing the film I’ll just say that I was a different person. I became suspicious of every cough, sneeze or throat clearing within earshot and way too aware of how often people touch their faces, then touch things, which we then touch. I understood why people in Japan walk around with face masks.

Now that some time has passed I’m not as panicked as I was right after seeing the movie. I’m less inclined to reach for the sani-gel every time I shake hands with someone. I also remind myself that we have been through recent pandemic scares such as SARS and Anthrax and of course the ever-changing influenza virus.

While movies like “Contagion” are entertaining, they can also make us want to hide in our rooms and not come into contact with any living creature; but we’ve got Facebook and texting for that. What we should do is listen to our mothers. The old adage “Wash your hands before you eat” isn’t for naught.

We can also be a bit prepared. Why not have a face mask for each person in the family? Redcrossstore.org carries a Germ Guard Personal Protection Pack with N95 Mask, which sounds very official, but is really a mask, gloves and hand sanitizer.

I still think we should rethink shaking hands as a form of greeting people. Wikipedia states that handshaking is thought to have originated either as a means of displaying an open palm sans weapon, or as a way of displacing an opponent’s weapon. And since most of us are not gun toters, maybe hugs are a good alternative.

My Life in Disaster is a series of blog posts by Maha Awad, who is volunteering with the Red Cross and finding out first-hand what it means to be prepared for life’s many disasters.