Married Couple Conduct Disaster Assessment in Mid-West Tennessee After Spring Storms

Val and Sarah Deutsch

By Elizabeth Storey, American Red Cross Volunteer

Several weather events struck the areas around Jackson, Tennessee in the final days of March. First, flash flooding, then high winds and even more rain and flooding. Two Mid-West Tennessee Chapter volunteers stepped up and completed disaster assessment across four counties during and after the storms. 

Val and Sarah Deutsch got a phone early on a Sunday morning about some wind damage in Grand Junction. Val, the Disaster Assessment Coordinator for the Mid-West Tennessee Chapter, assembled two teams, one to assess damage in neighboring Hardeman County and the other to Henderson County. “When we have a disaster, we need to know the scope of it before any other departments can take action,” Val said. “We have to be the first ones on the ground, and we have to be quick.”

Sarah’s team near Grand Junction saw several homes had been destroyed and learned how the residents had survived. “One house looked like it had exploded,” she said, “The owner was in there and not hurt at all. Another house had a tree come down on it. The people were in bed and it just happened that it didn’t hit them. They said they could look out and rain was coming in on them. You just don’t know how they walked out of it.”

Sunday was only the beginning of a two-week deployment of damage assessment for the two. Many Mid-West Tennessee Chapter volunteers were deployed to Nashville during this time to help with the flooding there so the two dedicated volunteers took on the local damage assessment work themselves. The next day, they received a phone call about damage in another community, Selmer. Once again, hitting the road to check out damages. Their assessments continued day after day as conditions worsened. “We went from Selmer to Grand Junction, just riding and see what damage we could find and assessing it,” Sarah said. “For two weeks, we did a lot of running.”

Over the two weeks of work, the two noticed a pattern of damage. “By the time we were through looking, we had a whole path of wind damage that just linked up,” Sarah said. Homes were damaged in what looked like a true tornado path. “We followed the path of it. For about a week we just got out and rode the country roads,” Sarah said. “A lot of it was country with trees down and a few houses that were hit.”

That week’s series of weather events meant they were looking for different types of damage every day. “It was a big regional disaster,” Val said, “It changed character every couple of days. We’d have a pocket of massively destroyed houses and then one or two out of the way. Then 30-40 miles away, it would come back down again and a whole bunch of houses destroyed. It wasn’t in one confined area, so we were out hunting a lot.”

This dedicated pair spent more than 80 hours traveling throughout the damaged countryside and they believe they were able to assist everyone and get clients back in their homes. Because their roles require them to assess damage quickly, that leaves little time for interacting with the residents of damaged homes, but there’s still time for an encouraging word. “When they see the Red Cross car, they just come running to us,” Sarah said. “We make sure to talk to them and let them know the Red Cross is here and will help them as much as we can to get back on their feet and back in their homes.”