PAGE 2 | October 20, 2017 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
...Union volunteers mobilize for Puerto Rico
From Page 1
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out a deal: If AFL-CIO unions
could recruit 300 skilled union
volunteers, United would fly
them to San Juan and back.
Within days, unions found about
100 health care workers, 100
building trades workers, and
100 Teamsters who were willing
to drop everything and leave
home for two weeks. Two
weeks after Maria hit, a Boeing
777-300 flew them from
Newark to San Juan. The charter
flight was crewed and loaded by
union volunteers, and it carried
17 tons of donated supplies. On
board were volunteers from 20
unions, including nurses, doc-
tors, electricians, operating en-
gineers, carpenters and truck
drivers.
Among them were four nurse
practitioners and two registered
nurses from Oregon Federation
of Nurses and Health Profes-
sionals (OFNHP) Local 5017,
an affiliate of American Federa-
tion of Teachers. At the union’s
request, Kaiser Permanente
agreed to release them from
duty for the duration, but it was
unpaid service: Moved to action
by the enormity of the disaster,
some gave up two weeks pay;
Photo by Misty Richards
(International Standard Serial Number 0894-444X)
HERE IS WHERE THE WATER CAME … ON THE SECOND FLOOR. A woman
points to a line of black mold, the aftermath of flood waters reached the sec-
ond story of her home in Barrio Ingenio, half an hour west of San Juan.
others used vacation time.
Arriving in San Juan, they
boarded buses and got a police
escort to the sports complex that
served as command central. For
the next two weeks, women
union volunteers slept in locker
rooms in the Hiram Bithorn
baseball stadium, while men
slept in hallways in the adjacent
Roberto Clemente Coliseum. In
a covered area of the baseball
stadium, they bonded over
shared meals eaten together as a
group: beans and rice for dinner,
and ham and cheese sandwiches
for breakfast and lunch. Frills
included running water, show-
ers, and intermittent electricity
and air conditioning. But that
was more creature comfort than
most Puerto Ricans were expe-
riencing.
“It’s like a war zone,” said
RN Susan Gillispie, a former
army medic who works at an ur-
gent care facility in Beaverton.
“We have people with homes to-
tally destroyed, living under
tarps.”
Union medical volunteers di-
vided up into eight teams of as
many as a dozen, each headed
by a doctor, nurse practitioner,
or physician assistant. Each day,
each team would travel to an
area in need, in vans loaded with
supplies. Arriving at their desti-
nation, they’d set up pop-up
clinics or split up and go door to
door doing “welfare checks,”
sometimes with the aid of local
volunteers as translators. Each
would see as many as 20 pa-
tients a day, dispensing medi-
cine or changing dressings, re-
ferring the worst cases to
doctors, or helping them get ad-
mitted to hospitals. Often, they
encountered medically fragile
individuals who had exhausted
their supplies of oxygen, insulin,
or other life-sustaining drugs.
They also educated those
they met about how to treat wa-
ter to make it safe for drinking.
Seeing the need, nurses used
their own funds, and personal
appeals on their Facebook net-
works, to buy and distribute
supplies including medicine,
food, and hand sanitizer.
Turn to Page 5
JOBS
Permit denied for proposed
Longview coal terminal
The Washington Department of
Ecology on Sept. 26 denied a
water quality permit needed for
the Millennium Bulk Terminal
in Longview to move forward.
If built, it would be North Amer-
ica’s largest coal-export termi-
nal. The agency said it denied
the permit because the terminal
would have caused significant
and unavoidable harm to air
quality, vehicle traffic, vessel
traffic, rail capacity, rail safety,
noise pollution, social and com-
munity resources, cultural re-
sources, and tribal resources.
The permit was needed in order
for the company to fill 24 acres
of wetlands and dredge 41.5
acres of riverbed.
Millennium says it will ap-
peal the permit denial. The $680
million project — backed by 15
labor unions and/or councils —
would create 1,000 union con-
struction jobs under a project la-
bor agreement, and 135 perma-
nent jobs when complete.
Millennium, owned by Ambre
Energy and Arch Coal Inc., first
began its permitting process in
February 2012.