A Diary Of A Hurricane Response

It is early Monday morning @ around 7 am in Beaumont, Texas. The sun is coming up, and it is already hot and humid. We are staging in the parking lot of the Ford Arena, our home for the last 3 days. The storm Gustav is a few hours away. We are awaiting evacuation orders...possibly to Houston or San Antonio. We have been in 8 different states beginning last Thursday. We left from San Francisco, missed a connection and spent the night on the floor of the airport in Las Vegas, flew to Dallas, then on to Atlanta. From there we drove 600 miles in a caravan of ambulances through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and into Louisiana. After being told there were no ambulances for us there, we were then bused almost 300 miles to Beaumont, Texas where we now sit. Our strike team is a great group of folks from ALCO, COCO, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties, and we all get along well. We sleep in the rig or on cots in the arena, and the Red Cross is doing a great job keeping us fed. The crappy part is all of the waiting. At least I discovered I can blog here from my cell phone. Pretty cool. More later..