OKDHS staff welcome back the 20 co-workers who served as the emergency assistance team in southern Louisiana after Hurrican Katrina devastated the area. The state of Louisiana and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Services Administration requested OKDHS staff to help process emergency food stamps. After Hurrican Rita struck the Gulf Coast weeks later, another emergency assistance team responded.
"Welcome home! We're proud of you. We love you."
Co-workers and family members offered signs, smiles and tears as 20 OKDHS staff members returned from Louisiana last September. The social services specialists volunteered to travel to the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged area to help process emergency food stamps, as well as offer a kind word and tender hope. Weeks later, another 15 staff members deployed south after Hurricane Rita further added insult to injury.
“We committed whatever resources we had to helping our Gulf Coast neighbors,” said Hendrick. “Our staff stepped up to help where the help was needed, and I am proud of each and every one of them. They took a little of the ‘Oklahoma Heartland Spirit’ south because we believe it was the right thing to do.”
OKDHS received an Emergency Management Assistance request for staff from the state of Louisiana and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services Administration after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast last August. The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management, which is part of the state and federal emergency management system that guides and tracks emergency and disaster assistance between government agencies and other support providers, coordinated the emergency management request.
The request was filled and the first team of OKDHS social services specialists left Oklahoma less than 36 hours later. The team helped process disaster food stamp applications at a rate of more than 1,300 per day. Team members generally worked 14-hour days. Just three weeks later, the second team of social services specialists headed south after Hurricane Rita hit.
While 35 social services specialists from 23 Oklahoma counties located themselves physically among the destruction, hundreds more OKDHS staff, from every program division, tended to the survivors who poured into Oklahoma. For more than a month, staff helped nearly 1,500 evacuees at Camp Gruber, a National Guard post near Braggs.
“This experience made me search even more for resources for clients that I have,” said Fedro Givens, adult protective services specialist II, Muskogee County. “It made a change in my life and how I treat clients, not just hurricane or tornado victims, but people who are victims of whatever they are going through.”