Hello again. It’s been a while since I posted last. Since then I've ended up in New Jersey, but I'll get to that later.

Monday October 22^nd was our first day of work at the regional office for FEMA Region 7, which includes Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. Since there hadn't been any national disasters in a pretty long time, there wasn't really much need for FEMA Corps to be doing relief and recovery work nationwide, so they put us to work in an office. My team, including myself, was not very happy about that development at all. There were a lot of negative emotions and feelings of being mislead by the program, but there was also the acknowledgement that if there wasn't anything for us to do they had to send us somewhere to help with something, so we got over it. 

Like I mentioned in the previous post, we did some sight seeing in the city. My favorite thing that we did was go to Oklahoma Joe's BBQ. It's been on the travel channel, Anthony Bourdain has been there, yada yada. It was delicious.

Plaque on the wall at Oklahoma Joe's

Long line in front of the register

We stayed at a Candlewood Suites extended stay place northeast of KC a good ways. I don't have any pictures of the room that I was in, but it was essentially a glorified hotel room with a 2-burner range, sink, and refrigerator. And the 5 of us guys had to share it. There were 2 beds in the room and we brought 2 cots, which meant either someone had to share a bed or someone was going to have to sleep on the floor. Needless to say the room got pretty messy. The hotel also had a weight/exercise room which was nice, and a saltwater pool.

Saltwater pool and sunset

 Most of the work that we did the first couple of days was pretty menial for most of us, but I got one of the good jobs out of dumb luck and got to sit in on a lot of planning meetings, rubbing elbows with people that are pretty high up in the federal government. Our supervisors were really cool and embraced us immediately, and even asked our opinions on how to go about certain things, which now that I think about it, was pretty cool because I had some input in the decisions made by the federal government. Kind of a big deal.

They put me at a desk in the RRCC (Regional Response Command Center) which is a big room with cubicles and a bunch of screens with random weather and news on them and a bunch of TVs with different news stations on them. I felt like I was in a war room, and it was awesome. The best part of the short amount of time there came when Sandy came roaring up the coast. They let us sit in on a couple national video conference calls that had the White House and the Pentagon on the line and I got to see the conference rooms inside both of those places, as well as a bunch of other conference rooms from other FEMA regions. Because of my computer science background the people at the office set me up learning and working with GIS, which is where you make maps and such on the computer in order to analyze and visualize data. They pretty much gave me a computer and said “Go play,” for a couple days, and that was really interesting. I've decided that I like GIS. I really liked the GIS guys. I only got to work with them for a couple of days but I feel like it would have been a lot of fun if we had stayed...

My corner desk with some of my teammates

RRCC

So when Sandy started making her way past Florida everyone at Region 7 offices started getting really excited and things got pretty hectic. Our region historically aids one of the regions on the east coast, and on the Friday before the storm hit our supervisors were sent to New Jersey as part of a team that would aid in FEMA management during response and recovery. By Sunday the place was pretty dead, as most all of the staff had been sent east. But there was no word about what my team would be doing, so we just kept doing work on our current projects, although each day we were becoming more and more sure that we would get the call to go. I was in the command center on Tuesday morning and the rest of the day when Sandy was pounding New Jersey and New York, and it was really difficult for me to not watch all of the screens and news channels while I was supposed to be doing work. Finally at the end of the day, we met as a group with our TL, and she told us that we were headed east to finally do the work that we had been trained for. No word on where we were headed as a final destination, but Dayton, Ohio was where we were going to be staying for at least a night. That night was spent packing and talking about where we would be doing our work on the east coast.

The next day we got up and packed the van with all of our gear and hit the highway in an easterly direction with high spirits. The drive was pretty fine, not much to report. Sunny skies and boring states for hours on end. As we passed into Indiana it started to look cloudy ahead to the east, which was the western boundary of the storm system that had previously been hurricane Sandy. It was surreal to drive into a weather system in the Midwest that was also covering all of New England and was over the Atlantic.

Sandy approacheth

Sandy snow in the Pennsylvanian mountains

For the sake of skipping boring parts I’ll just paraphrase parts of the trip. We stayed a night in Dayton, Ohio, where the manager of a bar comped our pizza when he found out where we were headed, which was cool. Then we drove through Ohio and Pennsylvania and saw the snow that Sandy dumped on the mountains of PA. We stayed in Harrisburg, PA at some point. It was a very special night because Lesley drove up from Maryland to spend the night with me. It was so wonderful to see her again, it felt amazing. So it was a bummer when I had to be back at the hotel with the team at 5:30 AM so that we could get to Trenton, NJ by whatever time it was, I don’t remember at this point. When we got to Trenton we hung out at a location that I don’t think I’m supposed to disclose here for quite some time while people figured out what was going on/what to do with us and stuff. At this point we still didn't even know where we were going to be sleeping that night, everyone was tired, and there was a lot of uncertainty about everything. The only bright side to the story is that other FEMA Corps teams were there too and I got so see some friends that I hadn't seen in a couple weeks.

Finally after hanging around forever, we found out that we would be staying at Fort Dix, which is like 25 minutes eastish of Trenton. It’s an Army/Air Force joint military base, kind of chilling by itself in the middle of south-central New Jersey. When I found out where we were going I was picturing a gymnasium or rec hall filled with hundreds of cots and little to no personal space. But upon arrival it wasn't that bad.

Since getting here and up until I am writing this right now (November 27^th), I am on the lower bunk of one of 6 bunk beds in a room in a barracks at Fort Dix. There are 12 of us in here right now. I lucked out and got put in a room with a bunch of guys that I’m good friends with. We call our room “Man Land.” The showers are communal, which the first time was a little weird, but now it’s whatever. There are two rules in Showerville: face the wall, and mind your own business. I shower at 6:25 most every morning so I usually have it to myself anyways.

Right side of my room

My room. I'm in the back right bunk

My bunk (bottom)

I guess I’ll just finish out talking about my living situation for this post, and I’ll get into all the FEMA-related stuff in the next post, which I promise I will make a priority and publish it ASAP. They serve breakfast (if you can get up in time) and dinner at the chow hall right across the street from my barracks. The food is pretty decent. Lunch up until today has been either military or civilian MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). If you don’t know what MREs are, they’re essentially high-calorie rations vacuum packed in plastic that come with a bag to cook them in. To cook them you add water into this bag that has a packet of some sort of chemical in it (I’m guessing potassium-based, but I’m probably wrong) and it gets super hot and steams your food. MREs are pretty good the first couple times you eat them, but after a couple weeks I was starting to get sick of them. I still ate them willingly and even enjoyed them, but it was getting to be a little much. So today was the first day of a different approach to lunch, which was in a (non-vacuum) sealed plastic bag. It was a roast beef sandwich that came with chips, applesauce and a sparkling fruit drink. It was awful. Mostly because they have these lunches frozen until we get them in the morning and they’re supposed to thaw by lunch time. Well, mine wasn't thawed so I put it in the microwave. Pandemonium ensued. I ended up eating goopy roast beef sandwich soup with my bare hands and making the biggest mess I've ever made while eating. Thank god no one walked in on me during this moment of crisis, it would have been so embarrassing. Just melted cheese, mayo, mustard, and liquefied white bread ALL OVER my hands and face. It was great. I think I might actually go crawling back to MREs...

As for the base itself, there a bunch of Army and Navy guys all over the place. They leave us alone for the most part, but if you feel like talking they’re open to conversation. I talked to a couple guys that were gearing up to be deployed to Afghanistan. It’s kind of weird being at the place where our nation’s soldiers are sent out of to go to war. There are also a bunch of cops, mostly highway or state patrol, from all kinds of different states stationed here. At this point I’ve seen squad cars from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Illinois, Michigan and a few other states. From talking to one of them I found out that they’re mostly here as a response to the lawlessness that has been happening in a lot of the hardest hit areas. This includes a lot of looting I guess, so these cops have come from around the country to patrol the streets of these communities and keep things from getting too crazy. It makes me wonder what authority these out-of-state cops have to arrest people; are they granted special rights to exercise the law in a state that isn’t the one that they work for? Or are they here just to have a law enforcement presence and hopefully that will deter looters? I don’t know. I’ve also seen some Urban Search and Rescue teams as well as firefighters and such around this area of the base.

There’s a bunch more stuff but it will take too long to write so I’m going to post this and follow up later.