An American Red Cross in Greater New York volunteer of unparalleled commitment, Rebecca Callahan manned the phones at the New York Chapter's Hurricane Call Center in twelve hour shifts (in French and English) beginning the day before Katrina hit, handling some of the disaster"s most heartbreaking calls about missing, sick or elderly relatives.

The instant the opportunity to deploy opened up, she did not hesitate to sign on for a three-week stint in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, helping survivors of what she later dubbed "Hurricane KatRita.”   

Rebecca was assigned to The Baton Rouge River Center that normally hosts concerts, conventions, sports events, trade shows and theater productions. She plunged right in, processing between 300 and 500 Red Cross volunteers a day and making it a priority to match people with the jobs they were most suited to—logistics, volunteer processing, mass care, shelter operations or client services.  

Rebecca was impressed to meet volunteers from across the U.S. “We had a checklist for every state. We met volunteers from 49 states including Alaska, as well as from the Virgin Islands, Jamaica and Puerto Rico,” she said. “The New York volunteers were distinct. An FDNY team of 20 came in uniform.”

“At that point, about six days after Katrina hit, things were pretty much in triage mode at the shelters,” said Rebecca. “We suddenly had thousands of evacuees from New Orleans and the parishes immediately adjacent that had been destroyed. It takes time to process that many people.”  

Rebecca was on duty from 7 am to 9 pm. “After three weeks I was expecting my brain to explode,” she said. “It was amazing how fast the days went. I was awake/asleep … awake/asleep. You didn’t have time to even think about everything you were seeing. When I got home, I needed to mentally deflate.”

In addition to helping train volunteers, Rebecca interfaced with a press corps hungry for stories, and she squired a group of Hispanic celebrities around the shelter, among them Daisy Fuentes, Gloria Estefan, Tommy Lasorda, Andy Garcia and Jimmy Smits. They had come to lend their names to the relief efforts. Initially, Rebecca said, she let other volunteers speak with the stars. But when she saw Smits she said, “I’ll talk to him.” She adds, “I got ribbed by everyone about that.”

Her third week, Rebecca went into the field to Slidell and Covington, Louisiana, both of which had been devastated. Seeing entire towns where roofs were torn off and cars had been tossed onto houses, Rebecca understood the extent of the storm damage for the first time. “I almost wish I’d seen that sooner,” she said, “because I would have been able to give clients a better understanding of what they were going to be going back into—a situation where everything is totally destroyed.”

“Clients were relying on finding memorabilia,” she continued. “I’ve dealt with fires with a lot of damage, but you probably could get parts of the teddy bear you had at nine years old out of a fire-damaged apartment. Sadly, these people weren’t going to find even that much.”

The thing that stood out the most for Rebecca was the scale of the catastrophe. “I’ve volunteered at disasters where the Red Cross sheltered 100 to 300 people at once,” she said. “This went far beyond that.”

She adds, “Personally the experience was wonderful in the sense that I don’t think that I’ve affected that many people’s lives before. I’ve always had a motive to 'Improve a life a day.’ And I think I’ve filled that quota for the next twenty years. Which doesn’t mean I still don’t try—every day.”