Since the middle of last month, when Margaret Duncan left her home in Tulsa, she has seen nothing but floods and misery. An employee of the Red Cross who is supervising one of its five service centers here, Duncan helped flood victims in Michigan before coming to Chicago last week.
While she`s been away, parts of her hometown also have been inundated. That hasn`t helped when she finally tries to sleep after 12-hour workdays.
”That`s part of the life,” said Duncan, 34. ”I don`t expect to be home for another 2 1/2 weeks. However, my home in Tulsa is high and dry.”
According to Regina Zabel, a spokesman for the Chicago-Mid America chapter of the Red Cross, Duncan is one of more than 100 professionals working in the Chicago area, doing what the Red Cross does perhaps better than any other organization–providing all sorts of relief to disaster victims.
”We`ve got professionals and volunteers from all over the country,”
Zabel said, adding that the first Red Cross relief effort was to victims of forest fires in Michigan in 1881.
On Monday, between 50 and 75 people came to see Duncan and her coworkers in the gymnasium at Maryville Academy in Des Plaines. Most need things they took for granted a week ago. ”I just needed something to help me start pushing about three inches of gunk out of my basement,” said John Didier of Park Ridge.
Duncan said that other victims seek food, shelter, a place to do laundry, prescription drugs, and other services. ”Our goal is to get the family functioning as soon as possible,” she said. ”The needs are different but each family has something in common. They are still in the disaster stage.”
For more than a week, Red Cross workers have concentrated on three or four major jobs: helping local officials with damage estimates, providing about 16,000 hot meals a week from 25 mobile canteens, shepherding hundreds of families through bureaucratic paper work and handing out free clean-up kits with a mop, broom, bucket, detergent, disinfectant, sponges and garbage bags. This week, Duncan set up her portable office in a gym. Last week she was in Bay City, Mich., on a flood operation. The week before was spent doing the same thing in Grand Rapids, Mich. In May, she directed a tornado clean-up in Edmund, Okla., and a small flood operation in Shreveport, La.
”I`ve got it down to a science at home,” Duncan said of her time on the road. ”I`ve got a roommate who tells me what bills are due and I just send her the money.”
”It sounds almost ghoulish,” she said, ”but I enjoy disaster work.
It`s the one place where you know you can help, where you really get immediate gratification.”
On the road, Duncan often bumps into old friends who, like her, are very experienced at the disaster game. ”There are lots of war stories,” she said.
