Powerless

We are still at the Choo-Choo Express Garage in Rossville, Georgia near Chattanooga, Tennessee. We are parked outside, just inches from the rolling door to one of the service bays, and we still have our 30-amp power connection. From the inside, all appears nearly normal and we can go about our lives mostly uninterrupted.

The fact is, however, that Odyssey normally has two internal combustion engines and three electrical generators, and at this moment, all of those are on the ground outside of the bus. The main engine and transmission are in the service bay, and the Kubota diesel generator is next to the bus under a sheet of plastic to keep it dry. The big 50DN 7kw main engine alternator is out at the alternator shop being serviced as a precaution, and the little 12-volt alternator from the generator set is in a baggie awaiting reinstallation.

I had hoped to post an update here much earlier than this, as it has now been more than a week. But I've been working more or less non-stop, starting around 7:30 each day and not quitting till dinner time. After dinner I collapse in a heap on the couch; this is the hardest I've worked since the first week of the Alabama tornado relief operation. I have managed to post a dozen or so times on the bus forum, mostly pleading for help, and I have tried to keep up with email.

We did have two days of "down time" after my last post. I put that in quotes because I used it up working on the projects I mentioned then. I spent most of Wednesday trying to get our Sunpentown Mr. Induction cooktop working. In part that's because I'm cheap and did not want to just spend the bucks to buy a replacement, in part it's because I detest throwing electronics into the landfill (the only option in most of the country), and in much larger part because our ancient model had a manual slider for temperature/cooking power that was essentially infinitely adjustable, whereas most of the newer models have strictly electronic touch pads and thus a fixed selection of a handful of temperature or power settings, as it is cheaper to make a touchpad than a slider.


Won't you take me to ... Sunpentown?

That proved to be a waste of time, as nothing I did would stop it from either blowing the thermal-magnetic breaker I wired in to the unit in place of the ceramic fuse, or tripping the inverter. The behavior was like a dead short, even though my meter clearly showed it was not shorted when it was powered down. Some sort of circuit failure that I can not diagnose must have been commanding the SCR to full "on" as soon as power was applied. Ultimately I salvaged a couple of parts and scrapped the whole thing, and we bought a new one on Amazon. The new models, at $70, cost only half what we paid seven years ago.

Choo-Choo just happened to have a brand new parking brake valve lying around, almost identical to ours. I needed to change just a single fitting, from 1/4" to 1/8" NPT, and by mid-morning Thursday I had the valve replaced. I was just about to start on the propane leak when the shop was ready to get to wok on Odyssey. Fortunately, I had already removed the rear bumper, including cutting out the failed trailer connection that had melted when our generator exhaust pipe had bent a bit too close to it. They had us back in to this exact spot, so we could remain comfortably outside while they had direct access to the engine bay.

Getting to all the connections to our engine required access through two squeaky hatches in the bedroom, and I needed to stay involved throughout the process just to get them past the weirdness that is Odyssey's mechanical layout. There is an old adage that the shop rate goes up if you watch, and it goes up even more if you help, and so I tried to strike a balance between being available to explain the weird bits, and staying out of the mechanic's way. Fortunately, Joel is cool, calm, and collected, and really knows his stuff when it comes to Detroit two-strokes.

When I was not helping Joel, I went back to working on the propane compartment. Wednesday I had made an adapter to put compressed air to the system and each of the hoses, and immediately discovered that the bulk of the leakage was in one of the pre-made hose assemblies that connects one of the cylinders to the regulator. There was also a smaller leak, albeit more difficult to correct, at the nipple connecting the regulator output to the rest of the piping.

There is a Camping World right across the freeway, and I picked up a replacement cylinder hose that afternoon, as it turns out, the very day our "club" membership there expired. I suppose that seven years is actually not a bad service life for a hose like this in a harsh environment; both hoses were stiff with age, and I would have replaced the other one as a precaution if they had carried that length, but they did not. A quick stop at Lowe's yielded a replacement nipple, and I was able to get the propane system back in working order by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile, by late morning on Thursday I had exuberantly tweeted, complete with photo, that everything was disconnected and the engine was ready to come out. Joel set to work on the cradle bolts while I blithely worked on propane, or whatever. At some point early in the afternoon he grabbed me, pointed at the generator door and asked "What's in there?" I could see him visibly deflate when I said "generator" and opened the door to show him.

As it turns out, the nuts for the last three engine bolts were behind the sturdy, built-in, sound-proof generator enclosure. Three of us spent 20 minutes or so looking at the situation from every possible angle to see if there was a way to reach the bolts without removing the generator, including trying to bend part of the enclosure out of the way with a crowbar. Ultimately we decided the generator had to come out, and I knew from experience this was a ten hour job. I confess that this revelation was something of a low point in the project for me.

While Joel continued to work on other things, I started to disassemble the ductwork and shrouding over the generator. At some point we were both working on it side-by-side and the extra-charge-for-helping adage continued to haunt me. He was very congenial about it, though, and eventually we got to the point where we could get the cherry picker on it before calling it a day.

Friday morning we lifted the generator up and worried it out of the compartment, a process that involved both of us manhandling the unit around while it was swinging from the cherry picker. It has to rotate around a fixed upright nearly at its midpoint, a tight squeeze. Once the unit was out and on the ground, my project list expanded, as I could now tackle several items that needed access to the back of the unit, something that can only happen when it is out. When life throws you lemons, make lemonade, and this was the bright spot in having to remove a perfectly functional generator.


The dark side of the generator. That's the alternator on the ground to the left.

Removing three more sides of the enclosure to get to the engine bolts (we only removed the top and front to get the generator out) was a daunting task and we opted to simply cut an access hole in the enclosure. As it turned out, after removing the sound shield and back wall of the enclosure, there was another layer of aluminum and more insulation to be removed before the nuts were visible. Good thing we did not bash the enclosure out of the way, because we'd still have faced this hurdle anyway.


The missing nuts.

Once we had access to the nuts, and I note here that the ends of the bolts had been trimmed to length in order to cover them over with insulation, shop owner Don Bowen welded them in place with some stainless rod. If we ever need to remove the engine in the future, we should be able to withdraw the bolts without needing access to these nuts. That said, there were several times during the engine removal process when Joel needed to reach something on that side, and being able to squat in the now-empty generator compartment and lean over through an opening normally blocked by ductwork came in handy. The generator and its ductwork will stay out until we are done with the engine work.

When Don was ready to weld, I disconnected all the electrical devices on the bus that might be damaged should any current stray from the welder. The engine computer was, of course, already disconnected, but I did need to pull the connectors off the transmission computer. And we unplugged all the electronics before I disconnected the batteries to shut down the inverter. With the way things were going, it was only natural that when I went to reconnect the batteries, the negative stud came right off the number 1 battery when I torqued the ground cable.


Hard to see, but the stud has come right out of the lead.

Fortunately, the shop had a post adapter lying around and we were back in business.


Choo-Choo to the rescue.

In case I have not reiterated enough how weird our bus is, once all the bolts were loose and they were ready to support the engine from below, it was discovered that the shop's engine stand, already successfully used on hundreds of coaches, was about 4" too wide to fit between Odyssey's frame rails.


Engine ready to be lifted. Note stand is too wide.

Out came the welding rig once more, and they spent the next half hour or so modifying the stand so that it would fit. We ended the day and the week just at the precipice of pulling the beast out.

All the time I spent helping the shop crew meant that I did not make much progress on the project list. Even though I had purchased the parts for the propane project by Wednesday afternoon, I did not actually get the time to really work on it until the weekend. When I was not in the propane bay, I was on the roof, replacing the awning control unit that shorted out back in March. The good news is that the replacement awning hardware, while different from the original setup, is working flawlessly, and we once again have a working awning on the driver side of the coach.

While I put in a good amount of work over the weekend, we did manage to make it downtown, and we got to see the enormous tourist-trap complex that is the Chattanooga Choo Choo. We intended to eat there Saturday, at the Station House restaurant, but it was crowded and noisy and they had a 45-minute wait. We opted instead for a much quieter venue a few blocks away called Table 2.

Monday morning we got an early start on removing the engine. It did not go quietly. Among other things, decades of slamming the tail skids on the ground, often while turning, meant the bottoms were mushroomed and bent. Much time was spent with a torch and an engineer hammer moving bent metal out of the way. Lots of tight-fitting pipes and hoses and myriad P-clamps also interfered, and Joel would alternately appear in either the generator bay or the radiator bay to move something while I watched from above through the hatch. At one point Louise was stationed at the turbo hatch, I was stationed at the transmission hatch, and Mike observed through the generator compartment while Joel yanked on the engine with the forklift. It took all day but by dinner time the power train was safely in the shop.


Ahh, out at last. Shop owner Mr. Don Bowen in background.

Yesterday and today Joel was able to work quietly by himself, getting the engine and transmission split and taking the gear train off to access the end plate. At one point I needed to crank the engine around with a wrench while Joel observed the timing marks; I think we had to go around a dozen or so revolutions. The good news is that we have great compression in our engine, and the bad news is that means a 150-pound guy on the end of a two-foot wrench has to work really hard to turn it. I got my workout for the day yesterday, and I am still feeling it today.


Gear train exposed and ready to be aligned.

Mostly, though, I had two days to myself to work on other things. The generator needed more attention than I had thought. Way back in March of 2008 a Kubota dealer noticed the alternator was caddywumpus and causing excessive belt wear; in order to deal with the problem in tight quarters he removed the finger guard and clamped down on it with some extra nuts. I thought that I'd be able to retighten everything with the fingerguard back in place once the unit was out, but instead I discovered the real source of the problem: Over 20+ years and thousands of hours, the pivot hole through the aluminum casting had "wallered out" (that there's an engineering term) and was now oval. The alternator was once again sitting at a belt-eating angle, and the adjustment bracket was cracked.


Wallered-out pivot. I've been filing the worn face flat.


Matching wear on the alternator side. Too deep to file completely flat; I'll add washers.

Today's project was to drill out the main pivot hole one size larger and sleeve it with a length of 1/4" copper tubing, which just happens to be exactly the right size to fit the pivot bolt. I filled the remaining space of the "waller" with JB-Weld, and Don is going to weld up the crack in the adjuster for me. Tomorrow I should be able to bolt the alternator back up to the set. I also repaired a broken wire for the temperature gauge sender, which I had bypassed with an unsightly extra wire some time ago, and installed the remote-access dipstick adapter. The dipstick hole is on the far side of the unit and I've been having to reach around by feel to check the oil level. The remote tube needed some bending and coaxing in order to fit into our very low enclosure.

Once we had the engine out Monday evening, and mindful of how hard that was and what a tight fit it is in there, we did also spend a fair amount of time over the last two days looking into other power train options. Part of me has always regretted that we did not simply repower the coach with a more modern and efficient engine and transmission back when we did our first in-frame rebuild, and now that we've spent the money to get the thing out, it seemed prudent to check out the options.

After two days of back-and-forth on the bus board and calling around for prices on take-outs, we've concluded it makes little sense to change now. We have a low-mileage engine and transmission, even fewer miles on the rebuild, and there is no way we would recover the $20-$25,000 change-out cost in fuel and maintenance savings.

I expect the shop to have the engine back together again by tomorrow evening, and we should be sliding it back in on Friday. No telling yet whether we will be here through the weekend or not, but, if we are, I plan to spend it relaxing.


Apparently, I've been dirty, according to Louise. Oh, and I broke my glasses, hence the blue tape.

General Assembly is not in the cards

We are at the Choo-Choo Express Garage, a bus maintenance shop in Rossville, Georgia (map), a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee. We arrived yesterday afternoon, after an uneventful drive from Anniston, wherein we saw just a tiny fraction of the tornado damage that occasioned my arrival in Alabama in the first place.

On Sunday afternoon I wrote that we'd be discussing the oil leak over dinner, presumably with a glass of wine, and we walked just three blocks to Ruby Tuesday. While they do have a full bar, you can't actually get a glass of wine on Sunday in that county; harumph. I'm not counting on it happening in my lifetime, but I will sure be glad to see these ancient blue laws, unconstitutional as they are, overturned forever. At least we then understood why there was a huge crowd at the Elks lodge when we pulled in to park -- it's the only place in town to get a drink on Sunday evening.

In any case, after careful consideration, we decided the leak was just too bad to continue another 300 miles to Charlotte, drip oil all over some campground or church parking lot for a week, and then have to figure out where to have it looked at. Being just 120 miles from Chattanooga, and having already missed our opportunity to again be delegates for our congregation, we bit the bullet and headed north yesterday morning, knowing it would probably spell the end of our General Assembly aspirations this year. I suppose I was holding out a slim hope that this latest leakage was something else entirely, and after a few turns of a mechanic's wrench we'd be on our way, at least able to attend a few days of the assembly.

The shop backed us into a suitable position when we arrived so that they could look at the bus first thing this morning, with a cool engine. We had a nice Italian dinner just down the street, wine included, with friend, fellow bus nut, and Bus Conversions Magazine chief executive Mike Sullivan, who lives nearby and shares an office with the shop here. The shop gave us a 30-amp shore connection, so we were comfortable overnight. As promised, first thing this morning lead mechanic Joel took a look at the leak.

It took him less than a minute to confirm our worst fear: the leak is coming from the end plate gasket, which is likely split. Unlike the last shop, he did not think there would be any benefit at all to just tightening the bolts, whether or not that involved first removing the alternator. He was also certain that it would continue to get worse over time. As I wrote here when we first diagnosed this problem, the engine and transmission need to come apart to repair it properly.

Sliding the engine out of Odyssey is an enormous undertaking, and we have studiously avoided it up to this point. When we needed (twice) to have the engine rebuilt due to dirt ingestion, we had the work done "in frame," without removing it from the bus. Even Joel was not keen on doing it, and he had me pull in over the pit to see if the transmission could possibly be pulled out instead. Unfortunately, the required 8" or so of wiggle room in front of the tranny is just not there -- the only way to fix this will be to slide the engine out the back.

The good news in all of this is that the shop rate here is just $55 per hour. Joel was reluctant to provide an estimate, given the complexity of removing the engine from the extremely tight quarters of Odyssey's engine room. When pressed, however, he figured it to be in the range of $3,000-$6,000. That's painful, but we can live with it, especially compared to the figure I had in my head of twice that amount, based on most of our shop experience being in areas where the shop rates are nearly double what it is here.

After settling back in to the parking lot, we discussed the plan over our morning coffee, and decided to go ahead with the work while we are here. Joel needs to get two coaches out of the shop ahead of us, meaning he can't start until perhaps the end of the week. And he is figuring 4-5 days for the work, which will have us here until at least the end of next week. Not only will we miss General Assembly, but we will need to cancel our Red Cross availability for the rest of June.

I've got a bunch of other maintenance projects that I can work on during our downtime here, including repairing the awning that broke months ago, a leaky parking brake valve, some kind of leak in the propane compartment, and the induction hob that crapped out right after the propane was gone. And we can both use a rest, with no real commitments on the calendar, especially before this hurricane season heats up. Whenever we wrap up here, we have no concrete plans. Perhaps we'll make our way to South Dakota, for a break from the heat while we conduct some business there. Or maybe we'll head to the Space Coast for the very last shuttle launch, if it is not unbearably hot.

Photo by lawrencechua, used under a Creative Commons license. It's really quite cute: click the photo to see a larger version!

Foster kitten

My parking spot for the Mississippi flood Red Cross relief operation was behind the giant empty industrial facility we used as a headquarters. The building was over a quarter mile in length, and the walk from the bus to the front door was about a half mile. Fortunately, the warehouse staff arrived early each morning and opened the loading dock near the bus, cutting my walk in half.

The dumpster and truck parking area was near the loading dock, and I often strolled there in the evenings to drop off my trash and enjoy the only part of the day when temperatures dropped below 90 degrees.

About a week before Sean finished in Alabama, I was on my evening walk when I heard a very loud, distressed animal cry from under one of our box trucks. I knew the security guards were feeding a cat at the front door, and several puppies had been dumped on the property about a month earlier. The puppies had been adopted within days. I had also seen armadillos and possums, and had been warned to watch out for snakes. I'm pretty sure copperheads don't cry, so I approached the truck. Whatever it was, I figured it would be wild and afraid of humans, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't in the truck engine compartment.

Much to my surprise, when I got within 20 feet of the truck, a tiny kitten came barreling out from underneath. His tail was in the friendly, straight up position and he came right over to me, rubbing my legs, purring and meowing to beat the band. When I pet him, I could feel his skinny ribs and his fur felt matted and lumpy. Poor little guy! You can't be more than 6-7 weeks old. Where is your mother?

I scooped him up and carried him back to the bus. At the very least, I had soft canned cat food and a safe place for him to sleep. He inhaled the food, purring and crying while he swallowed. How long had it been since he last ate? I took Opal's plastic carrying crate outside, put in some soft rags, a small litter box, more cat food and a bowl of water. Since I was worried that he had fleas or other parasites, I put the kitten in the secure carrier and tucked it under the eaves of the building for the night.

I knew there was a No-Kill animal rescue center in town, so on my lunch break the next day, I drove kitten and carrier to the shelter. I had plans to drop him off, make a small cash donation, and be on my way. But as soon as I walked in, the staff shook their heads and said, "No room at the inn." However, they gave me worming medicine, kitten food, and special gentle flea shampoo without asking for any money. They suggested that I take some photos and write up a story about "Rudy the Red Cross kitten" and they would post it on their website, assuring me that he would probably be adopted in a week or so.

A week! What was I going to do with a kitten for a week? Well, obviously I was going to feed him, and bathe him, and give him his meds. The good news was that the lumps that I thought were scabs or fleas turned out to be small burrs and his own skinny vertebrae. After his bath and a few more meals, he was looking and smelling good. He must have only spent a few nights out on his own, and I never saw any evidence of worms. He was also impossible to photograph, because Rudy never stopped moving.



Back in the office, I put up posters asking if any volunteers who lived locally were interested in a kitten. Within 2 hours, a young woman who had just taken a paid staff position at the local Red Cross chapter approached me. Ashley had just moved into her new apartment and was looking for a kitten for company. She met Rudy and couldn't resist him. Hooray, Rudy has a Forever Home! However, Ashley was going to be away from Jackson for the weekend, working on the relief operation in the northern part of Mississippi. She didn't want him to spend his first few days alone in her apartment. Could I keep him two more nights?

Now that Rudy was clean and healthy, and I knew I could enjoy his company without having to commit to adding another animal permanently to the Odyssey menagerie, I was thrilled to cuddle and play with the little guy for a few more days. He was great fun and very cooperative about sleeping in the dog carrier at night and when I was in the office working. Rudy and Opal became great friends. The old girl wagged her tail and followed her tiny buddy around from one end of the bus to the other. George and Angel...well, you'll have to watch the video to see what they thought.



Ashley picked the kitten up and reports that he is happy and healthy. She renamed him, but he'll always be Rudy to me.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program

That program, of course, is never-ending bus maintenance. It has been a long day, but we are now well-parked at the Elks lodge in Anniston, Alabama (map), with 30 amps of power, so we are cool, and I have a glass of wine next to me.

As I wrote on Wednesday, Louise had given her notice for Saturday so that we could possibly make it to our conference in Charlotte when it starts this Wednesday. She was actually all wrapped up before noon, and the nice young woman who had taken the kitten that Louise rescued came by around 11:30 to drop off the pet carrier we loaned her. I had Odyssey all prepped for departure, complete with filling the water tank, and we were rolling by 1pm, giving us plenty of time to make our planned fuel and dump stops en route to Birmingham.

We put 125 gallons of diesel in at $3.64 per gallon, a record low of late, at the Spaceway Truck Plaza in Meridian, the very same place I had been fueling the rental car on my few visits. Alabama has free dump stations at their rest areas and we took care of that chore at about mile 40. We rolled into downtown Birmingham right around 6 and parked just down the block from our club there, so we could catch a nice Saturday evening dinner. By 9 or so, we were parked for the night at the Wal-Mart just a few miles east (map). That's when the trouble began.

As Louise wrote while en route to Jackson, the house batteries have been acting up, not holding a charge. We've been presuming that they are simply at end-of-life, as they are now four years and over 2,000 cycles old, about the life expectancy of a set under our usage conditions. We had lots of trouble keeping the air conditioning running while we drove across Mississippi, and, at some point, we detected a burnt smell coming from the battery/inverter tunnel. The ammeter that shows current running between the chassis system, where the alternator is, and the house system, where the large battery bank as well as the inverter and air conditioners live, was also jumping all over the place. Perhaps, we thought, there is something more going on here, such as a loose connection in the battery bank someplace.

At the end of a long hot day, with outside temps still in the mid-90's, and the tunnel well past the century mark from the inverter working hard, was not the time to be monkeying around in the tunnel looking for battery problems. We set the electrical system up to run the rear A/C from the inverter and then autostart the generator as needed so we could at least be a bit comfortable while we slept. We had left everything off except the fans while we were at dinner, as the pets actually enjoy it a bit warm.

The A/C would only run ten minutes or so before the generator started (it is designed to go eight full hours), then the generator would only run ten minutes or so before deciding the batteries were full. Hmm. We changed the absorption timer to an hour and went back to bed, but, ultimately, we ended up running the generator most of the night. At one point, the battery voltage dropped so low that the inverter shut down and lost all its programming.

This morning we pulled everything out of the tunnel and I spent most of the day crouched inside working on the problem. As it turned out, the 400-amp battery disconnect switch had gone bad -- I discovered the problem because it was too hot to even touch. The heat generated by the bad switch connection melted the heat-shrink and some of the slit loom on the main battery and load cables, and fused the switch contacts together so that when I operated the lever to the "off" position, the switch was still "on." That forced me to disconnect a whole lot more pieces in order to remove the switch.

Unfortunately, the switch is a one-piece unit of riveted construction, so even looking inside to see if I could fix it would have been a challenge. I will eventually drill out the rivets to see just what happened, but in the meantime, I needed the switch intact so I could use one of the enormous terminal posts as a junction point to get everything reconnected. Some kind folks on the bus conversion board pointed me to suppliers for replacements, and it looks like I can order a new one for $145 or so. Of course, I'll have to go through the same shenanigans once again when the time comes to make the swap.

In the meantime, bypassing the switch seems to have cured most of our electrical/battery ills. The batteries are still four years and 2,000 cycles old, and won't hold nearly the charge they used to, but it is no longer critical. We were able to run one A/C for an hour and a half on the batteries today with an unknown charge state. After we give them a good soak tonight on shore power, we will see how well they do.

Sad to say, however, that our problems did not end there. Right after we got parked, I noticed the left front air bag was way up, and now from experience I know this is a leaking check valve. Too hot and tired to deal with yet another problem last night, we just dumped all the air from the system and spent the night down on the stops; fortunately we had a mostly level spot. Today around 2 or so, after I finished the battery project that I started at 7:30am, I crawled into the wheel well to rebuild the check valve yet again. One of these days, I need to convert that air line to SAE fittings so I can just replace the fancy, unobtainium German valve with a $15 item from a truck parts joint.

To top it all off, right after I noticed the air bag issue, I also found a pool of oil under the engine. The other issues are just minor annoyances in the scheme of things, but this can be a show-stopper. We've been dripping oil for a good 3,000 miles, and way back in March, we had the drip looked at in Bakersfield, at Delaney & Ahlf. They seemed to think it was coming from the end-plate gasket, and even suggested removing the alternator and tightening the bolts back there to maybe slow it a bit (though they did not have the time to do the work for us).

Back then, the leak was leaving maybe a silver-dollar sized stain on the ground at every stop. What I saw last night was much larger than that, and today while I was running the engine I counted two or three drops per second, whereas when I last checked it was more like one or two drops per minute. At this rate, we'll be going through a gallon every couple hundred miles or so. This could, in fact, be a leaking end gasket getting worse, but I am actually hoping that this increased flow really means the leak is somewhere else, such as in the crossover pipe, or the blower supply line.

Realistically, this is not something I can work on myself. Even finding the leak will require a pit or a lift, and taking oily bits off the engine is frowned upon in most parking lots. We need a shop. Right now, the big question looming for us is whether to divert north from here to Chattanooga, where we know of a good two-stroke shop with a decent shop rate, or continue on to Charlotte, attend our meeting, and deal with it later. I am sure this will occupy our dinner conversation; we'll be heading out shortly to one of the places about a half mile walk from here.

Gratuitous kitten photo by Louise. Kitten video coming soon!

Home at last

Today marks seven weeks since the deadly tornado swarm of April 27 struck Alabama. I left Odyssey for the San Francisco airport the very next morning, and yesterday was my first day back home. At just under seven weeks, this was my longest single Red Cross deployment since Hurricane Katrina, which we worked for 12 weeks straight.


Final shipment. Hard to see, but the floor of the truck is full of cases.

FedEx picked up our last equipment shipment from headquarters Monday afternoon, and three of us drove a one-way rental car to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where the Red Cross has a disaster "hot site" and warehouse. Two of my technology team from the Alabama operation picked up an Emergency Communications Response Vehicle (ECRV) there, which needed to be moved to Orlando for some upcoming training. One of those folks needed to go to Orlando anyway, saving a few bucks. Louise made the two hour drive to Hattiesburg to come get me, so the four of us toured the hot site and then went to dinner. After that, I was officially "off the job."

It is difficult to comprehend the scale of an operation like this one, which can lead to comments such as the one reader Dorothy left on my first post after arriving on the operation:

Saw the Red Cross had taken over a building in the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, AL. Probably over a hundred cars, plus a dozen or so of rented vechicles in the parking lot. Whatever good could a building full of people on computers do to assist people who have lost their homes?

Indeed, we had taken over the long-vacant Comp USA store in the Galleria (and many thanks to the mall for their in-kind donation of the building as well as their scissor lift so we could wire it; we paid only the utility bill while we were there). Now that we have left I can share the location; Dorothy asked "Why ever would anyone care?" I've written about this before, but the short answer is that neither can we accept donations nor can we provide any assistance at these "headquarters" locations. It is frustrating to clients and potential donors (and a potential public relations disaster) to show up at such a facility, especially if they have gone out of their way to get there, only to be told they are in the wrong place and be sent somewhere else. Places where we provide assistance are well marked and well publicized, while places we use only for logistical support are not, for exactly this reason.

Yes, there were over one hundred cars in that lot, and at one point we had close to 400 people in this building, as all volunteers arriving to Alabama for the operation were processed through here. In fact, Dorothy, nearly all of the vehicles you saw in the parking lot were rentals -- personally owned vehicles may not be used on a relief operation. On an operation of this scale, only a fraction of the volunteers responding will be from the local area, with most coming from out of town or out of state. Over the course of seven weeks, we used over 700 rental cars on the operation, and another 75 rented trucks. That's in addition to the 100 Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles (marked mobile feeding trucks), four Emergency Communications Response Vehicles (communications satellite trucks), and other Red-Cross owned vehicles sent to the operation from around the country, plus hundreds of tractor-trailers belonging to suppliers or contract carriers.

The sheer numbers on this operation were staggering. Since the initial tornadoes mid-April, just in Alabama, the Red Cross:

• Served 431,525 meals
• Served 996,751 snacks
• Distributed 26,708 clean-up kits
• Distributed 39,715 comfort kits
• Distributed 918,685 bulk items such as tarps, shovels, diapers, water, etc.
• Opened 35 client shelters
• Provided 7,951 shelter overnight stays
  
• Used 114 vehicles to provide mobile feeding
• Opened 8 kitchens supporting 21 feeding sites (in addition to the mobile feeding trucks)
• Opened 44 emergency aid stations
• Made nearly 17,000 outreach and health service contacts, and another 10,000 mental health contacts
  

To do all this took over 2,600 of us, of whom 85% are volunteers like myself. Most of those 2,600 workers were in the field, staffing shelters, kitchens, warehouses, bulk distribution sites, outreach centers, and emergency aid stations, or driving around the impacted areas in rental cars or mobile feeding trucks making direct contact with or providing food to the impacted families. Headquarters staff topped out at just under 200, and we had around 150 computers and ten printers deployed in the headquarters building.


The operation director rallies the troops at HQ before sending them to their assignments.

Most of the staff in headquarters provide direct logistical support to the field operation, with the remainder supporting the needs of the volunteers on the ground. Serving nearly half a million meals and a million snacks, and moving millions of relief supplies like cots, cleanup kits, and even stuffed animals for displaced children, in a state where the infrastructure has been badly damaged, requires dozens of volunteers with telephones, computers, fax machines, and all the other modern trappings of a Fortune-500 company. And what my team does is to take an empty building like a vacant big-box store, without even a single working telephone line, and turn it into a working Fortune-500 company in under half a day.


Our technology team, in front of the four ECRVs

At the peak of the operation, I had a team of 20 people. That included the four two-person crews for the ECRVs, which were essential due to widespread communications outages throughout the state. Not only did we set up (and later tear down) the headquarters, but we also provided equipment and support to six remote service delivery sites, three resource centers, a warehouse, two (of 35) shelters, and hundreds of outreach teams. In addition to setting up over 170 computers, we issued 400 cell phones and dozens of two-way radios. In the early days of the operation, while cell phones were inoperative in many parts of the state, we leveraged a community of amateur radio operators to communicate in and out of the impacted areas.

It is at the same time mind-boggling and elegant; chaotic and organized; tiring and energizing. We love what we do, and I accomplish more today with a sea of laptops on plastic folding tables and a handful of volunteers than I did in corporate America with a $20M Network Operations Center and a hundred trained technicians. But it is very hard to explain to people outside of the disaster relief field just what it takes to get the job done.

Louise, of course, is still working. Her operation here in Mississippi is ramping back up now that the flood waters have begun to recede (it is impossible to distribute relief supplies or meet with the clients while their neighborhoods are still under water). While I can probably help out here just by walking in to HQ, I am not really needed, and I do need a few days off. Old habits die hard, though, and I spent yesterday repairing the satellite dish that was damaged on Louise's very first day on the road.

I did, indeed, have a spare for the part that broke, from back when I purchased an entire used mount to fix a cracked elevation stop. Ironically, we were also parked behind a Red Cross warehouse at that time as well. The dish, while a bit worse for wear, is working properly again, and we will not need to renew the pay-as-you-go MiFi, which Louise bought as a backup, beyond the current allotment, which runs out in just a few days.

While this operation probably has another two weeks to run, Louise has been here nearly five weeks already, and she's not really very busy at this point. She's given her notice for Saturday, and we are planning on heading to Charlotte, North Carolina for our annual conference that begins next Wednesday. We may yet wave that off if things get crazy here, or if we are called to another disaster in what is shaping up to be a very busy season. But that is the plan right now, and I will be spending the next couple of days trying to find us a place to park in Charlotte.