California Sun

As expected, my team was not in Lexington, KY for long. After just a month, we got a call to head out to California after the wildfires devastated multiple communities. After a five day trek across the country and consolidating all our stuff from two vans into one, my team made it to base camp in Lakeport, CA. We got to work the very next day, working 12-hour days at a FEMA MRIC (Mobile Registration Intake Center) in Middletown, CA in the parking lot of a casino (photo below.)

On the drive between Lakeport and Middletown, the devastation is very visible: charred trees, homes with nothing left standing but the fireplace, blackened vineyards, etc. Social services dot the main street in Middletown, including housing assistance, free food/water/clothes/toiletries, shelters, debris cleanup, and more. We haven't registered an overwhelming number of people, but many of the people we've met have lost their entire homes.

My team leaves the Lakeport base camp at 6:20am and returns at 8:30pm. Although our base camp has fun things to do and is located on a beautiful lake, we've had very little time to enjoy it.

Some of the other FEMA Corps teams living at the base camp with us are getting deployed to the east coast in preparation for Hurricane Joaquin. My team probably won't get sent there since we so recently crossed the country, but as we have learned, anything can happen in FEMA Corps.