How to volunteer in Albany’s storm cleanup

Jan. 22 was Drew Barwick’s 34th birthday, and all he could think about was Albany.

As vice president of sales for his family’s River Mill Data Management and Med Away Disposal Services, he had customers in Albany, like doctors’ offices from which he collects medical waste.

He lost contact with some of them after a tornado hit Albany on Jan. 2.

“I called every day until I’d checked in with all of my contacts, some of them I’d consider friends,” he recalled. “A couple offices took up to a week to get power and their phone lines reconnected.”

On Jan. 21 and 22, another wave of storms swept south Georgia, and Albany was hit again, hard.

“My contacts in Albany were telling me that everyone had damage to their home or office, their power was out, or someone in their office had damage to their home,” he said.

He started calling agencies there to gauge what was needed. At first officials hadn’t much to tell him: They were in search-and-rescue mode. The relief effort hadn’t started.

Gradually Barwick got a clearer picture of the devastation.

“I was getting a feel for what parts of Albany underwent the most damage. I contacted organizations like Habitat for Humanity and my Rotary Club to see what relief efforts they knew about,” he said. “I tried to let people know on Facebook about every organization that I was connecting with, where the damage was, what kind of assistance they needed on the ground, and what items they needed to be donated.”

He was determined to go see what he could do there himself, though he tore an ankle tendon Aug. 8 and hadn’t fully recovered.

He got help from Shaun King and Ralph Frank, who work with him on downtown Columbus’ First Friday Art Walk. Attorney Christopher Breault loaned Barwick his Toyota Tacoma pickup, and they loaded it with borrowed chainsaws.

Calling ahead

Before they left at 7 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 24, Barwick did something storm cleanup volunteers sometimes neglect: He called ahead to ask where to check in for guidance.

That’s important, for multiple reasons. One is that after a disaster, authorities must secure affected neighborhoods to protect private property, so they want to know who’s going in and out.

Good Samaritans who don’t know where they’re going may further snarl traffic on roads already impeded by downed trees and power lines, and they may miss the areas where they’re most needed.

Another reason is that local authorities directing the emergency response can count volunteer hours toward matching federal emergency management aid.

A portion of those relief funds require a matching local contribution, said Chief Eugene Anderson, an assistant Albany fire chief directing the emergency response.

When volunteers in a federally designated disaster cleanup check in with the local agency leading the effort, the agency can count that labor in a “soft match” for federal money, Anderson said.

These are the Albany contact numbers for volunteers: 229-483-6226 or 6227. For anyone already in town or driving down, volunteers rendezvous every morning at 700 E. Oglethorpe Blvd., an old Kia dealership. The work starts at 8 a.m.

Barwick didn’t know that, when he went down to Albany. He worked through another volunteer group. He found out about the funding rule later, and since has been passing it around on social media.

Driving to disaster

Along with chainsaws, Barwick, King and Frank threw some donations in Breault’s pickup that Tuesday after the weekend wave of storms and hit the highway.

Early evidence of the storm was flooding. Houses on high ground looked like islands in a lake, Barwick said.

On down the road were convoys of Georgia Power trucks and fields of fallen trees.

They dropped the donations at the Cutliff Grove Family Resource Center. Around the corner was a volunteer center in a Coca-Cola bottling company.

Organizers there sent them to Radium Springs, on the south side of town. On the way they were checked through a police roadblock before stopping at the next volunteer station, where they were given a map to Azalea Boulevard, homes built along the edge of a golf course, where thick pine trees were lopped off like a giant lawnmower roared over them.

They weaved the pickup through debris and asked the first workers they saw what to do.

That crew didn’t know. They were contractors, not relief workers.

“So we found the house on the street with the most trees in their yard and got to work,” Barwick said. “We cranked up the chainsaws and started cutting the trees into more manageable pieces. Not much later, a young man showed up with several helpers, chainsaws, and a heavy duty vehicle with claws.”

The dentist’s widow

The newcomer told them the home belonged to a widow he’d known for years: Her husband had been his dentist.

So Barwick, Frank and King shifted to stripping limbs off fallen trees and cutting trunks into pieces the grab-all truck could pick up. Some of the trunks had a diameter of three or four feet, he said.

They worked seven or eight hours, during which they met locals delivering supplies.

A massive cleanup takes more than muscle and machinery. It needs fuel.

Volunteers in golf carts came by regularly with snacks and drinks.

“It was nice to see their smiling faces and hear how grateful they were for people like us,” Barwick remembered. “When we were finally worn out, it still looked like a disaster area; like we’d hardly made a dent.”

They went out to eat, then headed home. Barwick had to go back to work.

Most volunteers do, said Chief Anderson: Albany gets an influx of folks ready to help on weekends, but that slacks off when they have to go home and earn a paycheck.

Still they’ve made a deep dent in the debris, he said. Albany is well along on getting it off houses, out of yards and onto the roadside for pickup.

One skill Albany needs now requires no heavy lifting, the chief said. It’s computer data entry. All the raw data collected during the cleanup needs to be compiled and tabulated, so people who can handle a keyboard now come in handy.

Here in Columbus, Barwick is back at work in the family business, but still spreading storm news on Facebook.

Asked in an email what he took from this experience, he wrote:

“With all of the unrest across the Southeast and the nation, I realize that the only way through the mess is if we come together to help each other succeed. That means helping each other stand up when we fall and acting as a step ladder, enabling others to reach new heights. We need to step out of the box we hold ourselves in, open our minds and hearts, really listen to each other’s needs, and take action to make other people’s lives better.”

This story was originally published February 5, 2017 at 6:08 PM with the headline "How to volunteer in Albany’s storm cleanup."