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Ketuckians help Gustav victims

September 04, 2008|MICHAEL BROIHIER

Within minutes of the alert being sent out via the KHELPS network Saturday, the phones of members of Lincoln County Medical Reserve Corps began to ring and e-mails hit inboxes throughout Lincoln and Garrard counties.

The message was simple: Kentucky was going to receive up to 5,000 Hurricane Gustav evacuees, many with special needs, and volunteers were needed to man shelters in Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green and Owensboro.

Kentucky Health Emergency Listing of Professionals for Surge was established to "register, notify and inform individuals who are interested in volunteering in the event of an accidental or intentional emergency, or other public or health care disaster." All members of the Lincoln County Medical Reserve Corps are registered with KHELPS.

Less than six months old, the Lincoln MRC still is in its initial recruiting and training phase, but there was a good response from volunteers to fill critical billets for everything from bilingual nurses to pharmacists. With the broad mission of helping man shelters, checking on elderly and shut-ins, and conducting surveys, MRC members were a good fit to augment the shelters being established across the commonwealth.

Ultimately, a much smaller number of evacuees arrived by air in Kentucky. Tuesday and Wednesday this reporter and another MRC member worked a 12-hour shift from 8 p.m. until 8 a.m. at Louisville's Kentucky Exposition Center.

The Medical Reserve Corps wasn't the only unit to turn out in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav. Max Hester, pastor of Stanford Baptist Church, departed Sunday with the Disaster Relief Kitchen Unit that is usually pre-staged at the Lincoln County Baptist Center. When he checked in from the road on Tuesday he was staged with 24 other bluegrass volunteers awaiting word from federal survey teams on where to go. They had planned to stop at a motel along the way and await instructions, but the flood of evacuees had booked every room along their route and they had to camp out Sunday night in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Capable of providing 25,000 meals a day, the unit is on standby at a Baptist campground just south of Jackson, Miss. Hester said that while they were waiting for word from the Federal Emergency Management Agency on where they were needed, his "can-do group" was painting the inside of one of the campground's buildings to have something to do.

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