As Hurricane Isaac moved through the U.S. Gulf region recently, a Webster woman was among around two dozen local American Red Cross volunteers who offered their help.
Hurricane Isaac was also a first for Lucille (DiMuro) Frisicano. It was her first deployment as a Red Cross volunteer. She was in Florida and Mississippi from Aug. 23 until Sept. 2.
“I call myself retired, but really I stopped working the end of June,” Frisicano explained. “I took the summer to relax, go to the Y every day with my niece, clean closets, etc., but then I decided now was the time to have some fun and make myself useful.” She had looked into volunteering with the Red Cross before, and went back to it.
“I thought the Red Cross was a place that had a need and that I could be useful,” she said.
She joined the Disaster Action Team, which responds to local fires and emergency situations, and also signed up for the National Response and Health Services teams.
She started taking (necessary) classes in July and had just finished a “disaster and sheltering” class Aug. 22 when she received a call the following day.
“It was kind of exciting,” Frisicano said. She quickly packed and was deployed to Tampa, Fla., Aug. 23.
When the hurricane veered westward, she drove seven hours, in bad weather, with two other Red Cross volunteers to Hattiesburg, Miss., and became part of a team of six that opened a shelter in a middle school in rural Centreville, Miss.
“And that was really the best part,” Frisicano said of the shelter, recalling that when they arrived, there was no power, but they still set up cots and blankets and had 20 — mostly children and the elderly — stay with them the first night.
It was so hot and humid that her glasses steamed when she walked outside, and her shoes were wet the whole trip, Frisicano said, but she says she “had a lot of fun” with the people and especially the children.
“These people live there ... And when my feet were wet, I thought about the soldiers who were in Vietnam and thought that if they could do it, so could I ... There are people, like firemen, who do this all the time.”
At the shelter, Frisicano and her team served MREs (meals ready to eat) that arrived in a rental truck to dozens until they closed up Sept. 1.
As Hurricane Isaac moved through the U.S. Gulf region recently, a Webster woman was among around two dozen local American Red Cross volunteers who offered their help.
Hurricane Isaac was also a first for Lucille (DiMuro) Frisicano. It was her first deployment as a Red Cross volunteer. She was in Florida and Mississippi from Aug. 23 until Sept. 2.
“I call myself retired, but really I stopped working the end of June,” Frisicano explained. “I took the summer to relax, go to the Y every day with my niece, clean closets, etc., but then I decided now was the time to have some fun and make myself useful.” She had looked into volunteering with the Red Cross before, and went back to it.
“I thought the Red Cross was a place that had a need and that I could be useful,” she said.
She joined the Disaster Action Team, which responds to local fires and emergency situations, and also signed up for the National Response and Health Services teams.
She started taking (necessary) classes in July and had just finished a “disaster and sheltering” class Aug. 22 when she received a call the following day.
“It was kind of exciting,” Frisicano said. She quickly packed and was deployed to Tampa, Fla., Aug. 23.
When the hurricane veered westward, she drove seven hours, in bad weather, with two other Red Cross volunteers to Hattiesburg, Miss., and became part of a team of six that opened a shelter in a middle school in rural Centreville, Miss.
“And that was really the best part,” Frisicano said of the shelter, recalling that when they arrived, there was no power, but they still set up cots and blankets and had 20 — mostly children and the elderly — stay with them the first night.
It was so hot and humid that her glasses steamed when she walked outside, and her shoes were wet the whole trip, Frisicano said, but she says she “had a lot of fun” with the people and especially the children.
“These people live there ... And when my feet were wet, I thought about the soldiers who were in Vietnam and thought that if they could do it, so could I ... There are people, like firemen, who do this all the time.”
At the shelter, Frisicano and her team served MREs (meals ready to eat) that arrived in a rental truck to dozens until they closed up Sept. 1.
She marvels that not one person she helped was unappreciative or grouchy.
“We had a few laughs, too,” she said, “then we got to come home” (away from the downed trees, rain, power outages, and so on).
Frisicano says she is now watching the weather, and is already packed and ready to go again — but did invest in a pair of waterproof boots, now in her suitcase, when she got home.
She will be signing up for more classes.
Besides the Red Cross, she continues to help organize donation drives in support of Rochester’s School No. 17, which Sawgrass “adopted” a year or so ago, Frisicano said, and is active in the Rochester district of the New York State Peri-anesthesia Nurses’ Association.
“I thought that come fall, I’d do some per diem (one day at a time) nursing,” Frisicano said. “But I’m really liking the Red Cross ... I want to see how busy they keep me ... I’ve had a pretty blessed life.”
