Pennsylvania search and rescue team eyes Irma
Sitting in his backyard, feet up, basking in the Pittsburgh sun on Saturday, Ted Ruscitti felt grateful and guilty at the same time.
He’d just returned from a weeklong stint in Texas, flying plane his back twin-engineand forth Cessna between a makeshift warehouse in Georgetown, Texas — outside of the flood zone of Hurricane Harvey — to Orange, Texas — inside the flood zone. Each trip brought a half-ton of diapers, water bottles, medicine and assorted take-for granted items to victims of the hurricane that has since been somewhat eclipsed by the emerging threat of Hurricane Irma.
Mr. Ruscitti, who has been flying to disaster areas for three decades, spent the weekend refreshing weather radar maps and monitoringamonggroups on volunteerhow the to split debate flight resources between the known disaster and the predicted.
With the past week a blur, Mr. Ruscitti must decide if he’ll do it again in a few days when the damage and needs of Hurricane Irma reveal themselves.
Already he regrets that he wasn’t able to pack his small plane with more people to evacuate in Texas.
It’s a bittersweet offer — carrying people to safety from a distance where they can breathe in the expanse themof destructionout. that forced
For distraction, the pilot always invites his guests to sit in the cockpit.
“But most often, people just want to be alone with their thoughts,” Mr. Ruscitti said. “[Some] will want to see their neighborhood from the air. And some of them want to pull the curtains.” Whatever spurs volunteers to action — for Mr. Ruscitti Ruscitti this time around it was hearing that a child in Baymont, Texas, was running out of a specialized bandage for a rare skin condition — the realities on the ground almost always require some kind of recalibration. For those who have worked more than one disaster relief effort, the lessons of previous ones are baked into the next response. Pennsylvania Strike Team 1, the state’s largest urban rescue crew — 90 strong — seized on the lessons of Harvey to stress decontamination procedures during the team’s bimonthly training Saturday morning. “What’s in that water?” hazardous materials manager Jim Eaborn asked rhetorically, inviting a halfdozen team members to fan out around a new, mobile hand-washing station, which he called a “most important thing.”
The team now has two of them, he stressed.
Watching scenes from Houston and following the dispatches of first responders on the ground, Mr. Eaborn said the decontamination training he started three years ago comes into sharp focus.
“There’s probably everything in that water you can imagine,” he said.
The Pittsburgh-based response team isn’t likely to dispatch to Florida to deal with Irma’s aftermath, but its lessons, too, will trickle up to Pennsylvania, members said.
The same is true for local utilities that have already sent groups of line repair workers, mechanics and supervisors south to help with Irma recovery.
About 30 West Penn Power workers packed their bags with two weeks of supplies and left Sunday morning for Lexington, N.C., where they might be stationed until as late as Tuesday before dispatching to downed wires and damaged substations in Florida. Many are veterans of other hurricanes in the Florida area.
Duquesne Light sent 14 contractors to help Georgia Power with restoration efforts and another 25 employees are planning to head to Florida on Monday.
Brianna Guarino, a New Eagle resident, drew on her experience helping animals and people impacted by severe flooding in Louisiana last year to organize an impressive hurricane relief effort last week.
Shortly after her father called on a Sunday night saying he’d like to do something to help the victims of Harvey, they put out a call on Facebook and by midday Monday, half a trailer full of donations was already on her parents’ driveway.
Before long, Cox’s Market in Monongahela donated goods and offered another trailer. Mosites Motorsports donated the fuel expenses for the travel and threw in a truck and a trailer. Hundreds of people heeded the Facebook call.
Within a week, a caravan of trailers arrived in Louisiana, where the Cajun Commissary, an organization that Ms. Guarino came to know during last year’s effort, distributed the donations to a church feeding 3,000 evacuees.
Now, with two more trucks headed to Louisiana this week, she suspects that the Cajun Commissary might choose to shift some of the aid to those who end up devastated by Irma.
As long is it gets to those who need it, she said.