requests for help, often transporting several injured patients in their units at one time. three of their finest have been kind enough to push through one more night shift and stay up with us tonight. charles stewart, bobbi banks and rick shriver with us. charles, every squad has the grind about training, has the person saying, we ve got to have a drill on saturday, sunday, because training is everything. they tell me you are all about training and they tell me it s why everything worked so smoothly. can you admit to that? i am the education director for northstar. reporter: and how did it go? it went pretty smoothly for us. we, again, responded to everything, every call that came in, we responded right out the gate as soon as things began. we train all year round for these kind of things. we train on a regular basis with tuscaloosa fire department, dch, all the other agencies here for
mass casualty incidences so that we can be prepared when these things happen. reporter: bobbi, i m told this was your first day as a supervisor? yes, sir, it absolutely was. reporter: that s unbelievable. i saw a patient today walk up to a member of the national guard and just get treated in a shopping center parking lot. how did you possibly triage, prioritize all the calls? well, actually, as soon as the tornado was over, we responded immediately, or we lifted our doors manually because we had no power, so we just immediately knew that there was people out there that had to have our help. reporter: did you send out the rigs generically? yes. we sent one within two blocks so that was very hard hit. we actually were a lot of us in the base when it hit so we saw it, we raised our doors, immediately responded. triaging, as far as that s
and what did you say to him? that i loved him. we re lucky to be alive. i m so glad you re okay. today we were with connie as she returned with friends and family to gather anything she could from her demolished home. you live in an area where several relatives also have homes. six, to be exact. exactly. how many of those homes are still standing as we sit here today? one. unbelievable, huh? still, she considers herself lucky. her second cousin, his wife and two children, who live about a mile away, were all killed. an entire family wiped out. the little girl s a friend of mine, chelsea was a friend of my son s. four others were also killed in ringgold. will this community ever recover? it will be years. reporter: let s talk about another natural disaster.
this or that. i do this for one reason. that s people lost their homes, survivors. i always try to put it in the context of, this is their second day. many people have gone back to their homes, there s nothing left. they re putting in the baskets the last things they can salvage. should they be waiting another week? how do you view the people who live in these homes right now who are out of these homes? they re the survivors. you know, a lot of times we talk about disaster victims. over time what i learned is, that s really a patronizing term. they re the survivors. they re ultimately going to have to get control, make decisions and move forward. i need to respect that, and i need to understand that, from my perspective, they re not somebody waiting for me to come tell them what to do. they re going to start doing the things they need to do. that s what a survivor does. reporter: the new man in charge at fema. while we can try to give you numbers and charts and graphs that try to
the surrounding neighborhoods getting hammered. what s happening to our weather? there s more storms out there. you know what? anyone with a phone is a cameraman. so you re going to document more storms. i think that is attributing certainly the inflating totals. but cities have never been immune, neither have mountains, to storms. with such a juiced-up jet stream during the winter, houses buried 30 feet under snow, all we did was fast-forward to april, record warmth, instability, active jet stream equals a recipe for disaster. and we ve seen that. reporter: this seems like something else entirely. at the center of the tornado that came through here, at the center of a big storm like katrina, it is basically as much energy as nature can produce on earth, correct? the kind of tornadoes that moved through on april 27th make up 0.4% of all the tornadoes. in this country, that s about 1,300 a year, which we really have added to especially this past month. the historic months with m