As Hurricane Milton takes aim at Florida, the American Red Cross has continued to send volunteers to the region to help with disaster recovery. One of those volunteers is Joe Balcher. He signed up to be a volunteer on Monday and left for Florida on Wednesday morning.
“I’ve always wanted to, always wanted to be part of helping others out. My last career was as a nurse,” said Balcher, from South Kingstown, RI. “I learned lots of compassion and as a nurse, that person, whoever I was taking care of, was one of my family so I’m going to do the same thing out there.”
Balcher said his desire to volunteer combined with the recent damage caused by Helene is what motivated him to sign up with the American Red Cross.
Balcher left for Florida with a second volunteer, Ted Linn. This is Linn’s first deployment, but he has been a volunteer with the Red Cross for more than a year, responding locally to fires in Connecticut.
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“I think it’s horrible, the devastation. Obviously, a lot of people are very severely affected by these storms and that’s really why I volunteered to go do this, to go help people recover from this horrible devastation,” said Linn, from Gales Ferry.
They departed with the last emergency response vehicle Connecticut and Rhode Island have to send to the region.
The American Red Cross already has 850 volunteers on the ground in Florida and another 160 people enroute.
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They pre-positioned supplies and on Tuesday night had more than 30,000 people in their care in shelters. They expect that number to grow on Wednesday as more people evacuate.
The volunteers will work in the shelters and deliver ready-to-eat meals, water and snacks and clean-up kits.
But the Red Cross made it clear, they have volunteers in nine other states affected by previous storms and wildfires.
“This is an all-hands-on deck, but we’re not abandoning Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, Idaho wildfires, Georgia, all the other disasters we’ve already committed to. We’re asking more people to step up and that’s what we’ve been doing from Connecticut and Rhode Island. We’re doing our part to get our volunteers out the door,” said Jon Basso, the senior director of disaster cycle services at the American Red Cross.
