Editor’s note: This story is part of a short series that will chronicle 65-year-old David Greene’s experiences, thoughts and feelings while volunteering in areas of Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey. Greene will periodically provide WYDaily with excerpts from journal entries he writes while he is with the American Red Cross in Houston.
David Greene saw no evidence of flooding when his flight landed in Dallas Wednesday afternoon.
It wasn’t until he was 33 miles outside of Houston that he saw evidence of major flooding along Interstate 45. Miles later, as the city’s skyline came into full view, Greene began to see heaps of trash and debris carried inland by the rushing water.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, Greene, a 65-year-old York County resident and retired Navy officer, has been at the Houston headquarters of the American Red Cross since Thursday, treating cuts, scrapes, bruises and sicknesses of both rescue workers and flood survivors.
“When I think about the magnitude of the situation on the ground, the suffering + misery, I am overwhelmed,” Greene wrote in a Thursday morning journal entry. “There is so much ‘bad’ happening to so many people.”
Two pit stops on the bus ride from Dallas to Houston revealed a multi-state response to the devastation left by Harvey. Greene saw pickup trucks loaded with bottled water, gasoline and mobile barbecue smokers, and many other vehicles towing boats on trailers.
Greene also met several firefighters from Oklahoma who were headed to eastern Texas with a boat in tow.
Since arriving in Houston Thursday and being assigned to the staff wellness division at the headquarters, Greene said he has seen many maladies, some beyond the “usual” cuts and bruises related to disaster response.
Greene has seen many people with respiratory issues and sicknesses, much of which stem from inhaling mold stirred up by the floods.
“You see people come out of their homes – some people swimming out their front door – just soaked in contaminated water,” Greene said Sunday. “It’s not good for you.”
The “organized chaos” of the rescue efforts in eastern Texas left Greene in awe, he said. In his diary entries and photos, he documents seeing hundreds of volunteers cycle through the headquarters, charts and diagrams on the wall documenting where resources are going, and piles of necessities for flood survivors.
“Disaster response seems to be about bringing order out of chaos,” Greene wrote. The 65-year-old deployed under “health services,” but many of his fellow volunteers were responding to Texas as “sheltering” volunteers, he wrote.
On Saturday, Greene wrote of the professionalism and familial atmosphere among Red Cross volunteers.
“Talk about ‘storm chasers’ these guys are professional ‘disaster chasers’ and the big million-dollar question is WHY!!??” Greene wrote. “And I think I’m starting to figure it out. This [disaster response] has become my biggest extended family I ever could have imagined.”
On Sunday, Greene ventured out of the Red Cross headquarters to help flood victims, stopping to talk to people as they piled debris from their homes on the curb.
Greene noted how quickly sights could change, from joggers and people walking their dogs on one street, to an intersection loaded with debris just down the road.
“I remember looking at neighbors who had no damage + thinking why me?” Greene said, referring to when his house was damaged during Hurricane Isabel.
Despite a sometimes-overwhelming number of patients and people in need, Greene wrote he saw the “organized chaos” of the first couple days in Houston slowly shift to “more organized than chaos.”
“Client needs will change as waters recede, but the numbers of client needs will not diminish as people start to put their lives back together,” Greene wrote.
