By: Doyle Rader

Volunteer responders from the American Red Cross North Texas Region when strong storms blew through Texas the night of March 2. It left thousands without power and others with significant damage to their homes. The National Weather Service confirmed several tornadoes, ranging in intensity from EF-0 to EF-1 touched down in Cass, Franklin, Hopkins and Marion counties.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, straight-line winds exceeding 70 mph ripped roofs off homes and buildings. The winds shredded the roof of an apartment complex in North Dallas, displacing dozens of residents. The damage prompted the Red Cross to open a shelter at nearby Marcus Park Recreation Center with the assistance of Dallas Office of Emergency Management.

“Anytime I go to work in a shelter after a disaster, it's heartbreaking beacuse you know that they've lost more than just their home,” long-time Red Cross volunteer Susan Hyde-Mahoney said. “They've lost some mementos that they're probably not going to be able to get back.”

Hyde-Mahoney was one of several volunteers who answered the call to staff the shelter when it opened Friday. Around 2: 30 a.m., a family of four — a mother and her three children — arrived at the shelter seeking refuse. Mahoney says that the mother was terrified that the rest of the ceiling at her apartment would collapse around her family.

“The good thing was that they got to sleep for a good five hours, and we know that they got fed,” Hyde-Mahoney said. “They did go and tell other people [about the shelter], but those people, thank goodness, had been assigned to new apartments within the facility or off-facility somewhere else. So, they were housed pretty quickly.”

Compared to other disaster deployments where Mahoney had worked — hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Ian, among others — this shelter was relatively small. With the family well looked after, she took the opportunity to “train-up” her colleague, Tiina Arjanen, who was volunteering at a shelter for the first time.

“It gave a really good opportunity to get a non-rushed layout to see how things go, how things operate,” Arjanen said. “It gave my supervisor a chance to do a really good, in-depth explanation of the processes and all the paperwork and such. Mrs. Susan Hyde-Mahoney, she was just exceptional.”

Arjanen and Hyde-Mahoney were just two of the dozens of Red Cross volunteers who respond to needs of communities across North Texas after severe weather strikes. They don’t do it seeking notoriety, they do it because they know they can make a difference in someone’s life. Whether its one person or one hundred, they show up and make sure that each person gets the help they deserve.  

“Even just one person being in the shelter, I think, justifies why we needed to have something,” Hyde-Mahoney said. “Our servicers were needed and four people benefited from them that night.”