We talked a little bit about fires as well, but Red Cross also plays an integral role in distributing emergency supplies when a disaster has come through, like the flooding in West Virginia that you referenced a little while ago.

That's right.

So when a flood comes through, people need cleanup kits.

They need shovels.

They need bags, plastic containers that they can put things in.

Whatever the need is within that community is what we provide to the people that have gone through the disaster.

Distributing those emergency supplies gets them able to start to recover.

So what does that mean exactly?

welcome back to the valley today i am your host janet michael we are on the zooms today with deb fleming she is executive director for the greater shenandoah valley chapter of the american red cross this is part of our ongoing series where we talk with deb every month about disaster recovery we talk about volunteer deployments we talk about blood drives we talk about flooding and being ready and all of the things deb So I'm curious that as we sit here on a hot and humid Monday afternoon, What does it look like from the American Red Cross perspective? What else is going on in the country that you're actively working on and actively

helping people with? This weekend has been an incredible weekend.

Unfortunately, there's been a lot going on from multifamily fires within our own chapter.

We've also had in our region a train incident that spilled hydrochloric acid and had to evacuate a town.

There's been flooding in Minnesota and Michigan.

There's a typhoon that is hitting Saipan and Guam, which is a category five.

And then we had storms and flooding and power outages.

Signing up to be a volunteer and to respond to a house fire in your neighborhood, in your community, is a good way to get your feet wet and then move through the ranks, so to speak, into larger things.

that you're going to get way more fulfillment out of it than you can even imagine has got to be beneficial for you to land more of the volunteers like her.

Yes.

And we just got word that they have decreased that number because we have been doing so well locally that they recognize they don't have to deploy quite as many people as they were expecting.

So the really great part about that is we have reached the numbers we have to reach for this year.

And we were wondering if we could do that.

I mean, it was a tall order.

But what ended up happening is within the organization, volunteers stepped up in ways that they didn't think about stepping up and said, yeah, you know what, I'll do that.

And that's why you are a little more less strict about those kinds of things.