By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
When Jeff Blunier volunteered to join Dowagiac's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) last year, little did the Sister Lakes man realize he would be dispatched for four months with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Pennsylvania flooding.
Sept. 18 Blunier flew to Atlanta for a week of disaster response training.
When he reached Beaver County, Pa., he happened to check the Daily News Web site and it was coincidentally the same day, Oct. 7, the story on Dowagiac's other CERT contribution to FEMA appeared, profiling Union Schools Maintenance Supervisor Dave Daniels, whose 21-day stint culminated in Louisiana.
A Pennsylvania resident could qualify for a combination of $25,600 in state and federal assistance. The Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) had 25 to 30 stations set up with phones and computers and representatives of several offices besides FEMA, from the Small Business Administration to Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
When Blunier arrived in Pennsylvania, he was deployed to Beaver County, 20 miles north of Pittsburgh. "Beaver County and Allegheny County, which is Pittsburgh, were two of the most devastated in the state," since three rivers converge.
Blunier estimated every application got reviewed at least four times "to make sure nobody fell through the cracks."
Blunier was surprised he did not get sent to Florida, where two of his children live. He also has a son and grandson who live in Georgia. His wife's family is from Alabama. "All three states were declared. I thought sure I'd hit one of those states, though they don't tell you where you're going until that time.
His DRC set up in a strip mall in former restaurant and lounge space provided by the landlord. "Three different dance floors," he said, "in an old-fashioned shopping center. The other was the Joint Field Office in Harrisburg. That was part of a 260,000-square-foot facility that at one time housed three different companies. It was empty at that point, so they leased it."
The application deadline was extended from Nov.18 to Dec. 18 because of the volume of calls to FEMA's national hotline because of "the massiveness of Florida and Pennsylvania. It was hard to get through. Extending it another month was very unusual and basically took an act of Congress."
Some claims processed quickly, but Blunier remembers the 74-year-old woman whose application he kept tacked up in his cubicle because it moved at a pace that seemed "cursed. I got to know her on a first-name basis and I promised her I would not leave Pennsylvania until her case closed if I had to pay for it myself. Fortunately, I didn't because it was $5,100. We helped hundreds of people put their lives back together again. The people who trained us and the people who furnished us to get into that position also had a piece of that action was the way I looked at it," Blunier said. "There were about 80 of us who signed up for 90 days. There were probably a total of 450 at the facility. We were in IA, individual assistance."
Blunier had been working for Dowagiac Housing Commission, which replaced him when he did not return after six weeks, so now he must find another job. "There's a possibility of getting on the (FEMA) reserve list" - particularly with disaster work looming in California.
Of the 450 people, probably 20 percent worked fulltime for FEMA, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Asked about his take on the increasingly extreme weather, Blunier replied, "I have a blood relative who's a Swiss scientist. I don't know him, but we've got the same name, and I've read some of his papers on the Internet. They say global warming may have led to the demise of dinosaurs rather than the asteroid hitting the Gulf of Mexico scenario. I lived in Las Vegas for seven years until we moved back to Dowagiac because I'm originally from here, and I saw three inches of snow once. But 18 inches at (the airport)? That's big news. I think global warming has a lot to do with it.
Blunier said he received a commendation letter from Oakland County's sheriff as one of 48 Michigan residents who went.
And one of the last to return home from Pennsylvania.