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Husband, Wife No Strangers To Offering Relief Assistance
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| By RANDY WELLS, Gazette Staff Writer |
September 26, 2005 |
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For nine years, Red Cross volunteers Ron and Pat Simkins of Indiana have responded on only a few hours notice to help victims of emergencies.
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They've been assigned to floods in Pennsylvania, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast and wildfires in Colorado.
Ron even helped at the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"This was far worse," he said of the Hurricane Katrina damage. "Many of them have nothing to go back to."
"This has probably been the most strenuous" of the couple's disaster assistance experiences, he added.
The Simkinses returned Tuesday from three weeks at a Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, La.
"At one time there were four shelters with 7,845 people," most of them displaced residents of New Orleans, said Pat, a retired elementary teacher. When the Simkinses left to return home this week, two shelters were still operating.
The shelter they served was in the River Center, a convention hall in the city's downtown. Evacuees from the hurricane slept on cots in the center's basketball arena.
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©Indiana Printing & Publishing Co. 2009
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