As Texas continues its recovery from Hurricane Ike, Vicksburg Red Cross directors Janice Sawyer and Beverly Connelly set out for Fort Worth this morning in an emergency response vehicle loaded with supplies.

“We got the request from our national headquarters this morning, and we immediately started planning to go,” Sawyer said on Tuesday. “Right now we don’t know where we’ll be staying or how we’ll be helping out. We don’t really know what we’re going to find when we get there, but we’re ready to do whatever they need us to do.”

Larry Gawronski, executive director of the firm that manages Vicksburg Convention Center and Auditorium has been in the Dallas and Houston areas almost a week assisting with “mega shelter” operations. As a member of the International Association of Assembly Managers, Gawronski helped put together the handbook on best practices for large shelters and is applying the lessons he learned in Vicksburg following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to aid in Ike relief. The convention center took in more than 750 evacuees during Katrina and provided more than 2,500 medical assessments after several smaller shelters in the area lost power and water.

“I’ve been assisting the Red Cross consolidate small shelters into larger, more functional spaces so they’re not duplicating teams and resources,” said Gawronski. “Right now we’ve got about 1,500 people in the George Brown Convention Center in Houston, and we’re ready to take on up to 2,500. We are expecting a wave of more people in the shelters because the Galveston residents are looking at being out of their homes for a long time,” he said.

Gawronski said he expects to be back in Vicksburg by the end of the week, while Sawyer said she and Connelly have no idea how long they’ll be in Texas. Although Sawyer and others have aided with disaster relief outside of Vicksburg before, she said this is the first time a local emergency response vehicle has been driven to the site of a disaster.

“Our community’s donated dollars that are there to help not only our own community, but the people of our nation who are in a disaster area,” she said. “The people of Texas need our help now.”