Fire! When DAT’s Diane Met Blood Service’s Thaddeus

It was 3AM when Thaddeus Nauden noticed the flames licking at his window. Was this just a bad dream? Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The home that Thaddeus had carefully designed and furnished — including his newly installed hardwood floors — was aflame. In minutes he was on the front lawn, filming a video in disbelief. Thankfully, help was on the way.

Across the city, Diane Sargent was springing into action, ready to help those in her community.   A twenty-year veteran of the American Red Cross Disaster Action Team (DAT), Diane was no stranger to late-night fire calls.   Originally, she’d thought the Red Cross was just for blood donations — something we hear quite often — and was intrigued to learn about our wider mission. Disaster action pro

Disaster Action Team volunteer, Diane Sargent, (L)
with Laurie Hagen  at the George R. Brown
Convention Center in Houston, TX during the
response to Hurricane Harvey

ved to be her calling, and now, she’s completed over 80 deployments to disaster zones across the country. You too may be familiar with the Red Cross’s response to large-scale disasters, setting up shelters and distributing supplies to affected communities. But often, our DAT volunteers face much more intimate scenes of devastation: house fires.

Volunteering with DAT, Diane says, equips her to be able to deal with large groups of people in need. Thankfully, those skills are very transferrable to one-one-one communication — so, en route to the fire, Diane called Thaddeus. She wanted to make sure he was holding up OK and comfortable meeting face-to-face. During the COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining physical distancing is an important part of keeping safe. DAT volunteers have to make sure they’re not endangering anyone they’re there to help.

This wouldn’t be Thaddeus’s first encounter with the Red Cross.  In fact, he had started as a volunteer in 2010, and signed on as a Blood Services employee in 2012. In his role, Thaddeus makes sure that hospitals have enough blood for important operations. From organizing blood drives to managing the logistics that link donors to patients, Blood Services is a critical part of the Red Cross. On the night that Thaddeus’s home caught fire, these two parts of the Red Cross — Blood Services and DAT — came together when Diane arrived on the scene. One awkward, pandemic-friendly greeting later, and Diane put her DAT training into action.

Beginning anew after a house fire is hard and losing everything can be catastrophic. It’s why Red Cross’s DAT teams act quickly to offer immediate assistance for those needing housing, food, and clothes. The services offered to the community by DAT, which also include emotional support and referrals to help with long-term recovery, are so often surprising that even Thaddeus, an employee of the Red Cross, was amazed at how much Diane and her team were able to provide.

We talked with Thaddeus about his plans for rebuilding. You can picture him with a smile as he verbally sketches out his next play — a new house, of course — but one that’s a little less lavishly outfitted. He loved the support he received from not only DAT, but his co-workers too, including Vicki Smith.

If you’ve just become aware of the critical work DAT does responding to house fires, consider volunteering Emergencies don’t stop, and you can help the Red Cross continue to our lifesaving mission during this public health emergency by donating at www.redcross.org.

Story by: Tim Snedden, American Red Cross

Communications Volunteer