Plainfield, NJ: The Tri-County Red Cross provided breakfast canteen service to the Point of Distribution (POD) exercise organized by the Union County Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) on Thursday, June 25, 2009 at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield.

This POD drill was designed to practice the flow of people at a site, to receive medicine during a mass distribution. Different scenarios were given to the participants, including troublemakers, lost children and people with special needs.  The Tri-County Red Cross gives support to first responders, including medical personnel involved in mass care, by providing shelter management training, food and shelter to staff during disasters, and health and disaster mental health services if needed. To learn more about what we do at different types of disasters, please contact Mike Prasad, Director of Emergency Services at 908-756-6414 x15.

As the summer is coming upon us, the Tri-County Red Cross is providing community outreach at a number of street fairs in our area. This is a chance for residents and others to learn more about the Red Cross and obtain information about disaster preparedness, health & safety education, blood drives, and Red Cross service to the military.

It's also a chance for people to volunteer for a single day of service with the Tri-County Red Cross. To learn more about upcoming street fairs we will be participatig in, please click on the Volunteer Link at the top of this page and find a Street Fair you can volunteer at! 

The Tri-County Red Cross donated a Shelter Manager Kit to the South Plainfield Office of Emergency Management (OEM) on June 5, 2009. This kit contains all of the paperwork, forms, signs and office supplies needed to open and maintain an shelter in the event there is a fire, evacuation, flood or other disaster that affects South Plainfield or any of the surrounding towns in their area.

The kit, contained in a large storage tub, also contains flashlights, trash bags, extra toilet paper, caution tape, gloves and a number of other items that can help turn a facility into a shelter.  The kit has about $250 worth of items in it - and was funded by the generous donations of the local public to the Tri-County Red Cross. The same type of kit was distributed to North Plainfield OEM last month. We have three more of these kits, which will go out to towns that are active participants with the Red Cross, in terms of establishing Red Cross shelters and providing volunteers to staff those shelters. We serve 22 towns, and we would very much like to have at least one non-school shelter in each town, to support local disasters - so we need funding to build 17 more kits. If you would like to donate towards the purchase of items for these kits, please click on the donate button below.

While the kits have a lot of paperwork forms, signs and other items that a shelter manager needs, missing are cots, blankets, food - and of course the large number of volunteers needed to staff a shelter. The cots, blankets and food we store elsewhere but it's the volunteers that we need more of, to help support local shelters in all of the 22 towns that the Tri-County Red Cross serves. We estimate that it takes at least 30 people to operate a small shelter per day - 10 people per 8 hour shift.

If you are interested in learning more about becoming a shelter volunteer - able to help us in the unlikely event we have a disaster, but ready and trained nonetheless - please visit our special shelter training page on our web site at www.tricountyredcross.org/dc.html.