I've never done a diary before, but this seems like a compelling reason to start. I'm one of those folks who almost never posts comments or ratings, but spends a lot of time reading DK every day. I am also a volunteer for the local chapter of the Red Cross and I know they have put the word out for help. This is the message from our chapter, I'm guessing other chapters have a simililar request:
Palo Alto Area Red Cross.
If you have time and want to do something other than donate money, call your local chapter. Since many of the staff and volunteers may be heading out to the affected area, they may need help in the local office to answer phones or cover other such duties. The Red Cross is also taking new volunteers, giving them crash training and sending them out on 7, 14, and 21 day assignments. (This is very unusual. Normally they only send out people who have had many hours of training and experience and they would not normally accept someone who can only go for 7 days.)
If you live near an affected area and want to volunteer, call the local chapter or just go to a shelter location.
A couple of other notes on the Red Cross just to clear up some of the misinformation I sometimes see passed around here and other places. (Note when I say Red Cross, I mean the American Red Cross. The International Red Cross is a separate organization with separate funding.)
First of all, the American Red Cross is a private organization funded by donors, not the federal government. If you make your donation to the "American Red Cross" and you specify your donation for a certain disaster, the funds will only be used for that particular disaster. If you specify your donation goes to Disaster Relief it will go into the general national Disaster Relief fund to be used as needed for any disaster. If you specify your donation for your local chapter, it will go into that chapter's local fund to be used for local disasters. The Red Cross responds to disasters as small as a single family house fire and small disaster responses are not paid for by the national funds.
This directed donation policy was actually a real problem after 9-11. So many people donated way more money than the Red Cross really needed to spend on that situation that the Red Cross was in a peculiar situation of having way too much money in one pot and, since general fund donations dried up, way too little money for all other disasters. They were close to broke for a while there. You should specify your donations however you want, but I personally send money for disaster relief in general.
The Red Cross Disaster Relief and the Biomedical Services are very separate branches. The restrictions they have in place that prohibit gay men from donating blood (which I very much disagree with!) are not at all indicative of any prejudices when it comes to who gets assistance in a disaster or who can be a volunteer.
There are multiple reasons that the Red Cross doesn't take donations of used clothing or the like. For one, cleaning, storing, and distributing such donations take a significant amount of effort and resources. But more importantly, giving disaster victims (or clients, as we prefer to call them) vouchers that can be used like cash to purchase goods provides the added benefit to the community of pumping economic resources into the area that has been hardest hit, which helps the whole community recover that much faster. Your donation of cash acts as a donation to both the client and to the merchant, who has often been just as devastated.
About 90% of the Disaster Relief personnel are volunteers. Paid staff make up a very small portion of the people doing the work.
Finally, when it comes to disaster preparedness, there are some easy things to do that we should all be aware of, because no matter where you live, you could be subject to a catastrophic disaster. The first thing is to have a plan. Think about where you would go, how you would get there and what would you take if you had to evacuate your house, your workplace, your neighborhood or your city. Designate a friend or family member in another state to serve as a point of contact for you and your family members. Use this person as a message center who can relay messages. Keep this person's phone number with you at all times. Remember if the landline phone system goes out, the cell phone system is also out. However, it may be that the phones will work to call out of state, but not for calls within an area, so make sure your point of contact is far removed from your location.