Caltech alumna Stephanie Charles in the vest that marked her out as a Red Cross volunteer during the relief effort.

Humanitarian in Houston

By Michael Rogers

On Sunday, August 28, with Hurricane Katrina bearing down on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Stephanie Charles ’73 got a call at her Mountain View, California, home from the Red Cross. But the humanitarian organization wasn’t asking for money. It was calling for her to physically lend a hand. Within 48 hours, Charles was on her way to a sea of hurricane victims.

Charles, who served last year as president of the Alumni Association, has been a volunteer with the Red Cross for the past five years. During that time, she’s been on call for disaster duty, in which volunteers are asked if they can give three weeks of their time to relief efforts in emergencies. But during previous disasters, such as the 2003 Southern California wildfires, she’d been unable to get away from her job as a telecommunications consultant.

This time, though, Charles had a rare block of free time in her schedule. And it became easier to offer help when the Red Cross lowered its time commitment to seven days to attract as many volunteers as possible to cope with what was shaping up to be a full-blown catastrophe.

Told to fly to the Red Cross staging area in Houston, Charles said good-bye to her longtime partner, Norm Berube, Tuesday morning and got to Houston that evening, after the levees had been breached in New Orleans. At a Red Cross meeting the next morning, volunteers were told that they’d be going to Baton Rouge, and many headed out for the five-hour journey. Charles was part of a group of 70 volunteers who were still waiting for their assignments when word came that they would remain in Texas. With New Orleans now mostly under water and a major evacuation under way, Houston had offered the Astrodome as a shelter. Charles and her fellow volunteers were told to head there to handle the flood of evacuees who were expected to start arriving in a few hours.

Their job was to provide food, cots, and other humanitarian aid and answer questions. Basically, they’d be running a facility that was about to become the world’s largest homeless shelter. It didn’t take a Caltech graduate to figure out that the numbers did not favor the volunteers. Says Charles, “Seventy Red Cross volunteers was minuscule compared to what we needed.” Luckily, hundreds of Houston residents started arriving at the Astrodome to help out.

The volunteers were divided into 10 teams, each working about a 12-hour shift, to care for men, women, families, the elderly, and those with special needs. They were told to prepare for 23,000 people. “For someone like me, it was a bit frustrating, because I knew that mathematically they could never fit 23,000 onto the floor of the Astrodome,” Charles says. “I estimated a maximum of perhaps 10,000.” Eventually, 12,000 of the arrivals were squeezed in the Astrodome, while the rest were sent to adjacent facilities.

On Thursday, Charles reported for work at the Astrodome at 6 a.m., and soon thousands of evacuees were streaming in. Wearing her Red Cross vest, Charles was stationed on the ramp into the stadium, whose floor had been stripped to its concrete foundation. Buses dropped people off outside the facility on the street level, and the exhausted arrivals had to walk down four levels past Charles to get to the Astrodome floor.

“It was surreal,” she says. “It was like being in a Third World country. The sounds, the odors, the sights were overwhelming. Many people were barefoot. People had open sores on their legs, probably from making their way through polluted floodwaters.

“We were worried that after all that they had been through, the people would turn into a mob,” Charles says. “But they were glad to be there. I can’t tell you how many people said, ‘God saved my life. I’m missing someone from my family, but I’m sure that God will make them safe.’ I don’t think that I could go through what they did and be so upbeat.

“The endless rows of cots were overwhelming when I stood back and looked at them,” she says. “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen or expected to see. But it struck me that it was rather orderly, which meant that people’s needs were being met and that they were almost able to settle down into something of a routine as they worked on finding lost family members and making longer-term plans.”

Late that day, she helped gather personal information from people for a computer registry. “At that point, people were telling us their stories. We had been too busy to watch the news, so it was very depressing to hear what had happened. Still, everyone there was optimistic. And polite. I haven’t heard so many ‘thank you ma’am’s’ in my life. The faith, optimism, and simple courtesy on the part of almost all the shelter residents were striking. They were good people.

“There were a tremendous number of children there. Quite a number of elderly. Not a whole lot of men under 50. An awful lot of single mothers. These were the people who had no means to evacuate earlier. For the most part, they were poor, inner-city folks. I would guess at least 95 percent of them were African Americans. I was astonished that there was no anger over what they had been through. I think they were just exhausted. People were so grateful to get something to eat and then lie down and go to sleep.”

After 15 hours on her feet, Charles got to her hotel room at 10 p.m. and collapsed in bed. On Friday, she was transferred to Houston’s Reliant Arena, which is sometimes used for livestock shows, and now housed some of the Katrina victims. “Here, I experienced one of the saddest things,” Charles says. “People were hungry and tried to hoard food because they hadn’t eaten in days,” but Red Cross officials wouldn’t let them bring food from the food dispensary to the sleeping areas because it could create unsanitary conditions. Charles had the unhappy task of guarding the door and letting people know they had to leave their food behind. “I told people to set their food against a wall and come back for it after they had claimed a cot, but there was incredible food waste. One woman had baby formula for her child and broke into tears when she was told that she couldn’t take it with her to her cot. I told her I’d hold it for her. She came back later and I gave her the bottle.”

On Sunday, a week after she answered the Red Cross call, Charles contracted a stomach bug that put her out of commission for 48 hours. “It was the sickest I’ve ever been in my whole life,” she says. She spent 24 hours in a temporary satellite hospital set up in the arena by Houston doctors and nurses, and was treated with antibiotics and five bags of intravenous fluids after antinausea medications didn’t work. After another 24 hours in bed at her hotel, she went back to work in the arena, but she had a series of volunteer commitments coming up in the Bay Area, so on Friday, September 9, she flew home.

As a Caltech-trained engineer, it’s not surprising that Charles turned her finely honed analytical skills to resolving a few of the logistical and other problems that surfaced during the hastily organized relief effort. She kept notes on her observations in Houston, and intervened when she thought she could improve things. She quickly noticed that many of the infirm who were brought to the Astrodome floor in wheelchairs were kept in them once they got there, leaving no wheelchairs outside to transport new arrivals, who remained stuck on buses.

“I ended up running a wheelchair brigade,” she says. “I went down to the floor and recruited volunteers to bring back wheelchairs from people who no longer needed them.”

The lack of clean towels also caught her eye. Once showers were set up, people were given towels to last their entire stay, and after one use, they got dirty and wet and stayed that way. It would have been better, Charles says, to hand out towels before individuals showered, collect them afterward, and then send them to be laundered so there would always be a fresh supply. She plans to forward these and other suggestions for improving future relief efforts to the appropriate Red Cross officials.

Constantly busy, “solving six problems at once, and multitasking like I had never done before,” Charles regrets that she had few opportunities to learn much about any of the thousands of people she helped. An exception was a woman who arrived with a family of 10, including her mother, who had recently undergone heart surgery. After volunteers at the registration desk refused to let her in because she had stayed in a motel for a couple of days until her money ran out, “I talked to her at length and got the shelter manager to allow me to break the rules and let her in,” Charles says. “We got medical attention for her mother. Later on I heard her call out, ‘Miss Stephanie!’ She came running up to me, hugged me, and thanked me. She said, ‘You were a lifesaver.’

“Overall, I have mixed feelings about the time I was there. The Red Cross did a tremendous job, but now that we’ve had the experience, there are lessons that we can learn from about how to handle a future crisis better. But it was very rewarding.”