By Charly SHELTON

The recent hurricanes that hit the east coast and Caribbean have leveled those areas. Entire buildings were ripped apart and blown away by high winds, streets were flooded and services like fresh water and electricity were nearly non-existent. These were the scenes rescue and relief crews walked into when arriving with air. One local resident, Jennifer Dutton, saw first hand the destruction that the hurricanes had wrought in the US Virgin Islands and the gratitude of those who needed and received help from the American Red Cross in this trying time.

“It really [emotionally hits hard] especially when you’re out there, you’re with people from all over the country that you’ve never met before that are now going to be the people you immediately trust and go to with your issues and your concerns,” said Dutton, who travelled down to the USVI with the Red Cross and AmeriCorps to bring aid. “In going into an area that you’ve never been to before and seeing the devastation and how these people are living, it definitely does take an emotional toll on you because not only are you taking on their emotions of what they’ve been through, but you yourself are also going through an emotional rollercoaster being out of your element and trying to find out how to help these people. It definitely takes a lot out of you.”

Dutton left on Sept 9 and spent the next three weeks on St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John islands, working in evacuation shelters and delivering supplies to local homes. As a disaster cycle services project coordinator for the American Red Cross and the AmeriCorps program manager, Dutton has seen the benefit that these programs can have both in shelters with those who have lost everything and in the field for those who need to rebuild after the hurricane hit.

“I spent my last week working in shelters and also doing bulk distribution, which is going out into the community and providing the people with cleanup kits, tarps, water and stuff like that to help them up on their feet,” Dutton said. “That part was particularly more rewarding because we are actually able to see those families in their homes that had been hit with the devastation.”

While working in the relief centers, cleaning up from Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Maria hit and Dutton had to ride it out.

“We didn’t fully understand how bad it was going to be [early on]. The information we were getting was it was only going to be about a Category 2,” Dutton said. “And then, the following Monday, the start of my second week, until Friday I rode out Hurricane Maria in the [evacuee] shelter with a few of my colleagues and roughly 200 [evacuees]. That was definitely an interesting time. After Hurricane Maria, we had to start from scratch again in terms of what we had and getting supplies in, and communication.”

Stateside, Jennifer’s parents, Paul and Lisa Dutton, were worried for her as there was limited contact during her time in USVI, but they knew that she had been trained to handle situations just like this.

“It is the usual parent angst of ‘oh my god’ and then, after that, it’s like, well she has literally been training for this for so long in a lot of different ways,” Lisa said. “But, as a parent, your heart clenches because she said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna ride out the storm’ and we’re like, ‘You know that’s going to be a Category 5 hurricane, right?’ ‘Oh yeah we’re gonna stay here and help the people.’ So it’s like wow, I am so proud of that kid. I am so scared for that kid.”

Disaster preparedness is nothing new for Jennifer. As a member of the Crescenta Valley chapter of Community Emergency Response Team – CERT – she and her parents have been involved in spreading the word about disaster readiness for years, through community events, training and assisting other agencies to prepare.

“It definitely shaped me in that I’ve always had this weird passion for emergency management and disaster preparedness,” Jennifer said. “I think it started before we were officially CERT people with helping to revamp my elementary school’s earthquake disaster plan and sitting on various committees in middle school and high school. Then getting through other CERT trainings and becoming a CERT instructor myself, it definitely was a deciding factor for me going into emergency management [with ARC].”

The Duttons are all three certified CERT instructors and deal with local disaster preparedness constantly, so this kind of relief work Jennifer did in USVI is just putting that lifelong training to use in helping others.

“As a parent, I was scared to death,” Paul said. “But I also know that everything that she’s been through, growing up as a CERT kid and now a certified CERT trainer with the sheriff’s department and, of course, a Red Cross professional now, she was actually one of the most prepared.”

  Charly Shelton, Jennifer DUTTON