CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Todd Cahill and his family lived in the Glenmore neighborhood for over 20 years before moving just outside the development in the past year. From the front window of his new home, he can see the East Rivanna Firehouse.
On Tuesday evening, Cahill was home with his family.
“We heard a tremendous boom,” Cahill said. “It shook our house.”
A suspected gas explosion had leveled a home on Ferndown Lane in the Keswick subdivision.
Cahill could see the firefighters spring into action and he did the same. The regional executive for donor services with American Red Cross, Cahill volunteered to assist the organization’s disaster response team.
Many people in the Albemarle County area equate the Red Cross with the organization’s blood drives, crucial work that supports the nation’s blood supply. Its work in major disasters, including earthquakes and flooding, is also well publicized.
Fewer people realize the role the Red Cross plays in more localized incidents, like Tuesday’s home explosion. The organization has disaster response teams that are trained, organized and prepared to rapidly respond to a wide variety of catastrophes.
Tuesday, a Red Cross team was on the scene within an hour of the explosion that killed one woman, seriously injured a man and caused damage to 12 other homes significant that those residents were displaced.
“As you got closer, you could see bricks in the road,” Cahill said. “From where the police line was, you could see some of the outer houses were damaged. There were a lot of windows that were broken. There were a couple of doors that were knocked in. the further you got in and closer to ground zero, you saw more structural impact to other homes. The siding was ripped off and you could see some impact to roofs. It was surreal. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
When he arrived at the scene, Cahill found Bill Fisher and other Red Cross workers already on the site.
Fisher, a disaster team manager, lives in the Glenmore neighborhood. He and his wife had been having dinner in downtown Charlottesville with friends.
“My next-door neighbor sent me a text,” Fisher told Cville Right Now. “He goes, ‘Did you feel that?’”
Fisher alerted the Red Cross’s disaster program manager that he was available to lead the organization’s response.
Arriving on the scene, Fisher huddled with Albemarle County Fire Rescue personnel, including deputy chief Emily Pelliccia, herself a former Red Cross board member.
Fisher’s initial task was to assess the situation and determine what resources would be needed, information he relayed back to the Red Cross.
The organization sent three more volunteers to the scene and assigned another two to support the efforts virtually.
“It was like having an army behind me,” Fisher said.
Fisher determined that the primary goal for his team should be connecting with the displaced residents from the 12 neighboring homes that were damaged in the explosion. Many of them, he said, were standing nearby, behind police caution tape, worriedly taking in the scene.
Cahill said one of the ACFR units had a large whiteboard attached to it with the names, addresses and contact numbers for many of those residents.
In disaster situations like Tuesday’s, the Red Cross is able to offer impacted people help securing lodging and buying food, clothes and other necessities. On Tuesday, it coordinated with ACFR to get residents escorted into their damaged homes to retrieve personal items and prescription medication.
But, maybe more than anything, the disaster response team is there to provide a measure of comfort to people who are often stunned and don’t know what to do in the face of tragic incidents.
“Part of what we do as the Red Cross is, we prepare for the worst. And when we sometimes see it, it’s the preparation that helps us get through things like that,” Cahill said. “We’re encountering people who are sometimes having the worst day of their life.”
Fisher and Cahill both understand that feeling. In 2009, Cahill’s family suffered a housefire. In 2001, Fisher was in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. He took a ferry back from New York to Jersey City, New Jersey that day.
“Who was set up there but the American Red Cross. And that made such an impression on me,” Fisher said. “That happened on a Tuesday. And on Saturday, I joined the Red Cross.”
The Red Cross has 700 disaster volunteers across the Commonwealth, including 175 in Central Virginia. That chapter responded to 168 disaster calls in the last fiscal year, according to spokesperson Jonathan McNamara. Those incidents include fires, floods, trees falling on homes and similar situations.
Chapter volunteers can be deployed statewide and even nationally to support responses. Charlottesville volunteers have been sent to North Carolina after hurricanes and California and Hawaii after wildfires.
For Cahill and Fisher, Tuesday’s explosion hit much closer to home, in a community both men described as “tight-knit.”
“It doesn’t matter where I go on these disaster calls. Someone always gives me a hug and thanks us,” Fisher said. “It’s very emotional. It doesn’t matter if it’s my next-door neighbor or somebody up in Louisa or Palmyra or down in Scottsville. Help can’t wait and we’re there for them, in often one of the worst moments of their life.”
