For Cranberry Red Cross volunteer, Hurricane Ian was a different experience
Cranberry Township resident Robert Gurkweitz had helped with nine Red Cross disaster relief efforts over six years, but nothing could prepare him for his drive through Hurricane Ian’s hardest-hit communities.
It was much like his first outreach experience, which, as with Ian, brought him to the city of Fort Myers, Fla., in 2016.
“It was shattering,” he said. “It was very emotional for me. Despite all the reading that I did and the studying that I did, I really wasn’t prepared to experience the heartbreak.”
Gurkweitz said he experienced “secondary trauma,” a phenomenon frequent among disaster relief workers that also impacts first responders, health care providers and other professionals. Experts link secondary trauma to a person’s empathy, and symptoms of this disruptive condition often echo PTSD in a more subdued way.
But as visceral as it still was, Hurricane Ian offered Gurkweitz a hopeful perspective. On this assignment he drove an emergency response vehicle through wreckage to destroyed homes, scraping debris off his truck, to deliver survivors food and other supplies.
“When you’re feeding people, you’re just giving them food,” he said. “They’re happy to see you. You see the better part of people when you’re dishing out food.”
“What impressed me most about this deployment was the people that I met in the trailer parks,” he added. “They’re friendly. They help each other. They’re good people. This is the kind of people that I love to work with. They just helped me deliver food. They help each other by getting them food. They drive each other around who don’t drive. They go run errands for people who can’t run errands.”
Many of these people had little left from Hurricane Ian’s devastation, which made this generosity of spirit all the more remarkable.
Gurkweitz’s nine other Red Cross assignments include a flood, two forest fires along the West Coast and six other hurricanes. But this was his first time stepping outside the scope of a shelter associate role to meet survivors out in the field.
Working in a shelter had also shaped him profoundly, but the setting sometimes brought him to darker places when he talked with people.
“In shelters, you get to communicate directly with various clients,” he said. “You get to hear their sad stories. You get to hear their hopeful stories.”
Gurkweitz cites his sense of reward in helping others recover from disasters as the driving force behind his work, a reward that brought him back to the Red Cross again and again.
“I just want to put out a plea for people to help the Red Cross, volunteer for the Red Cross,” he added. “We always need more people. We always need more money. We need more people donating blood. The more people we can, get the more people we can help, and that is so important.”
Gurkweitz’s selfless dedication to trauma survivors extended beyond his Red Cross roles. For several years he took care of his brother, a disabled veteran.
Gurkweitz also volunteered for a Veterans Affairs clinic after his 37-year career managing a computer system ended in 2013. It was only a couple years after this that he began volunteering for the Red Cross.
The path Gurkweitz led throughout his Red Cross deployments traces a path experts describe as vicarious transformation, which lies on the opposite bank of vicarious trauma. People who recover from secondary trauma learn how others can endure horrid events and still go on to live their lives.
The experience permanently changes relief workers such as Gurkweitz, but gives them a broader perspective so that they are prepared to be of even more help when their services are needed again.
