Colorado volunteers ready to help Puerto Rico after Hurricane Fiona
It's that time of year when Kim Mailes may have to leave Denver at a moment's notice.
"I'm on standby right now for Alaska, Puerto Rico and California," he said. "You never know where you'll wind up."
Mailes is a Red Cross volunteer and just returned a couple of weeks ago from helping flood victims in Kentucky. Now he's preparing to do the same after Hurricane Fiona slammed Puerto Rico.
"That's what the Red Cross does," Mailes told CBS News Colorado's Kelly Werthmann. "We're entering our busiest of seasons and, because of climate change, we're seeing incidences we never anticipated before."
Some 30 Red Cross volunteers in Colorado and Wyoming are on standby to deploy. Most of Puerto Rico is still without electricity and drinking water. Fiona's blow was even more devastating as the island has yet to recover from Hurricane Maria which killed nearly 3,000 people and destroyed the power grid in 2017. Mailes explained following that storm, Red Cross volunteers installed micro solar panels on many schools and buildings to help in future storms.
"And that's paying off," he said, "because we now have electricity in our shelters and it's working out great."
Still, hundreds of people are out of their homes amid the devastating flooding. With more storms likely to hit Puerto Rico this hurricane season, he said he is once again ready to help them recover and rebuild.
"When you become a Red Cross volunteer and put your boots on the ground, it stops being a big picture and it becomes a human picture."
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