The Associated Press
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Taking a break from laying sod in a tornado-torn neighborhood, volunteer David Elliott cocked his head to the left. He was trying to remember all the trips he’d made to help rebuild after disasters.
Elliott went to New Orleans seven times after Hurricane Katrina swamped the city in 2005. Or was it eight? He was in Nashville, Tenn., after floods inundated the city in 2010. He’s been to Alabama three times since tornadoes killed about 250 people statewide in April. Wait: That was just last year? “
I’ve lost track,” said Elliott, of Sacramento, Calif.
Rebuilding after storms is becoming a growth industry as the United States is slammed by more natural disasters. Leaders of response efforts say the nation’s recovery network functions as well as it does because of a backbone of volunteers nicknamed “disaster junkies.”
The small group of people like Elliott travel from tragedy to tragedy, shoveling mud out of flooded houses and rebuilding neighborhoods laid waste by busted levees, tornadoes and wildfires. Often, they bring more helpers with them.
No one knows exactly how many disaster junkies are active in the United States. But the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster says a core group of about 300 travels the country at least six months out of each year performing such work. Based in Arlington, the nonprofit group estimates that several thousand more are like Elliott and make several trips each year helping out after disasters.
Often associated with churches or other religious groups and traveling at their own expense, these volunteers sleep in churches or mobile homes and frequently eat food provided by other volunteers.
Volunteers and others provided labor worth about $147 million and donated $200 million more toward relief aid in 2008, the last year for which figures are available, but some recovery projects still can’t get off the ground because of the sheer number of disasters that struck the country in recent months, said James McGowan, associate executive director with National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster.
Thousands volunteer regularly without approaching “junkie” status. The American Red Cross, part of McGowan’s organization, said 24,236 of its volunteers helped out after 137 disasters in 46 states last year but that most went to only one or two sites.
Dan Burton, a Samaritan’s Purse project manager who has worked on disaster recoveries from Atlanta to Alaska, said the “junkies” provided a knowledge base and experience that many less-experienced volunteers lacked. Major-disaster assistance work would be much more difficult without them, he said.
“There’s an array of jobs to do, and they’re just willing to do whatever it is that we have to do,” Burton said.
With the spring severe-weather season drawing near, volunteers are still cleaning up and rebuilding from 2011, when the United States had a record 12 weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage. That’s more major disasters than occurred all through the 1980s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Aside from the dozens of tornadoes that damaged or destroyed about 24,000 homes in Alabama on April 27, there was the mega-twister that pummeled Joplin, Mo.; flooding in the Northeast from Hurricane Irene in August; wildfires in Texas and other parts of the Southwest; and flooding along the Mississippi River. And recovery work continues along the Gulf Coast from Katrina, the disaster that many people say spurred them to service in the first place.
The devastation of Katrina compelled Julie Davis to help more than six years ago, and she and her husband, Ken, have been repeat volunteers ever since. They once were “snowbirds,” or retirees who visited the South in search of warm weather each year. But now they spend weeks at a time each winter performing volunteer work in disaster-torn areas like Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Chatting with displaced homeowner Deloris Mack as her husband worked on the woman’s rebuilt house, Davis said volunteering was addictive.
“We are definitely junkies because you get it in your blood and just can’t quit,” said Davis, of Girard, Pa. "(It’s) just the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping someone, that they aren’t expecting anything and you just come up.”
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