Some Thoughts on Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers (SUV) in disaster response by Kevin McCartney, Fresno, California. October 13, 2005

EDITOR: Mr. Kevin McCartney is a CERT Fresno Graduate, current CERT Fresno Volunteer Instructor, Long-time Boy Scouts of America Trainer, American Red Cross Trainer in First Aid and CPR. McCartney spent 10 days in Houston as an American Red Cross. Disaster Relief Worker during the Katrina Hurricane aftermath. He spent two days opening the 12,000 capacity Reliant Astrodome Shelter before stepping up to serve as Shelter Manager during the opening and ongoing operations of the 18,000 capacity Reliant Center Shelter.

Here are a few comments about the role Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers (SUV) play based upon his first-hand experiences. We believe every potential volunteer should receive adequate training prior to a disaster, but reality is that people will want to volunteer in a disaster without receiving any prior training. It seems this phenomena of Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers is a particular human one. Every person involved in disaster preparedness need to spend time in the trenches to see how things function in practice. We believe it is important that we  “Work our Plan To See What Fails” and in this case McCartney saw what works and doesn’t work up close.

I think the trenches as being with Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers during a disaster. For the future here in Central California I see an urban environment that transitions volunteers roles from light search and rescue to Triage-medical, shelter, clerical work of documenting damage and finally providing assistance to survivors receiving financial assistance. If we are not very close to the disaster site, then the search and rescue role might be reduced. 

Except for those trained and affiliated individuals (CERT, Red Cross and perhaps older Boy Scouts, Civil Air Patrol, etc), I think "the trenches" will be in roles of training, managing and supporting the spontaneous unaffiliated volunteer (SUV) task. 

To illustrate my point, twenty CERT trained individuals will make a huge difference in a moderate disaster without any additional training. But, if we scale up in a Katrina size disaster to two hundred individuals all of whom are CERT trained then this greater number might not make the same "direct" difference. To have a major impact in a Katrina like disaster, we will need to use an “indirect” method or what could be called “leverage”. By using leverage we can turn CERT graduates into a front-line to quickly train, manage and facilitate the efforts of the two hundred SUV’s or even two thousand "less prepared" or SUV volunteers.

At one time, in the Houston shelter, I requested and received two hundred unaffiliated volunteers. All two hundred arrived together. They had already been "trained" by the volunteer center, but this training was really more of an orientation. We determined they needed further "on-site training" in the roles required to effectively manage a shelter. I had only five people with an equivalent "CERT level" training (I initially appointed this core as a logistics supervisor, bulk distribution supervisor, floor supervisor, message center supervisor, registration supervisor). Sizing up the reality of the circumstance, we leveraged these five disaster-trained people for the new role of training and supervising the spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers in a pipe-line process. We leveraged to get better efficiencies. Furthermore as any manager does for successful succession (we were all rotating through various lengths a duty-time from one or two days up through a maximum of only 21 long days), I had to also depend on the initial core five to select and train their own assistants for successor roles as they left (often within a day or two). The volunteer center did a good basic job of orientation of the spontaneous volunteers as a "volunteer" in general. Yet, for the center to function we had to conduct crash-course’s on specific tasks in operating our center in our five "departments". Each supervisor then trained the incoming for a specific task, or identified an assistant to train them for a specific task. i.e. the floor supervisor had an assistant supervisor for each area in the center "physical space quadrant" (area quadrants held elderly, families, single men, single women). While these assistant supervisors had been spontaneous volunteers just as recent as a few hours earlier, they now provided training for the incoming spontaneous volunteers. The growing shelter population and rapidly changing needs frequently required more volunteers, and the appointment of additional supervisors or assistant supervisors.

My center was focused on quickly training and utilizing spontaneous volunteers even before we opened the doors. I believe other shelters did not conduct similar training process. It made us a more effective and efficient shelter management team.  In fact as we grew in client population our training leverage enabled us to expand without major missteps. One example, we were able to rapidly disseminate accurate information – this is a proxy indicator our team was functioning very well.

After my experience in Houston, in a true disaster, I don't expect CERT members to perform the specific tasks we have trained them for. Rather, I think spontaneous volunteers will most likely perform those tasks after the CERT members quickly train them for a specific task. In truth, I hadn’t run a shelter, or even worked in a shelter except for the training we had undertaken from Red Cross as CERT graduates some eighteen months before the Katrina Disaster. But, I did know how to train and organize Boy Scouts to safely oversee a swimming and boating waterfront when we had a camp of 600-800 Scouts. We usually had as many as two hundred swimming and boating at one time. I learned at that time, by using a handful of teenagers that had been quickly trained we could leverage the trained scouts to oversee the untrained. This included REAL emergency situations like lost scout searches. These scout-learned leadership, training, organizational concepts transferred easily to shelter operations.

With the above in mind, I see an overlooked need for disaster training called "leadership under stress". In my thinking, an important way to train future CERT graduates would be to include the following:

    1) Introduce controlled stress with task tensions and perhaps isolation factors,

    2) Creating group objectives with rapidly changing objectives as the incident dictates,

    3) Changing working conditions suddenly

    4) Adapting to unfamiliar tasks and conditions

    5) Communication difficulties exaggerated by the above constantly changing conditions and priorities

    6) Exposure to all of the above as both a worker and a supervisor

    7) Frequent review and feedback