MITRE Team Responds to N.J. Communities Hit by Superstorm Sandy

February 2013

MITRE's Gabriel Galvan (back row, far right) and the rest of his team gather to deliver donated goods to the Salvation Army, for victims of Superstorm Sandy.

When Superstorm Sandy struck the Northeast in October, residents of coastal New Jersey were hit particularly hard. Thankfully, most employees at MITRE's Eatontown, N.J., site made it through the storm without major incident. But many Eatontown staff members had friends and relations whose homes sustained serious damage.

In response to the disaster, a team supporting the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs at the Eatontown site, along with their colleagues in McLean, Va., collaborated in true MITRE fashion on a volunteer effort to bring relief to those in need.

"When Sandy struck, our hearts broke. We wanted to do something," says Gabriel Galvan, the executive director for MITRE's VA work. "This effort was about a lot of people with big hearts pulling together over the holidays. We didn't want to turn the page in the New Year without doing something."

After contacting officials at New Jersey Salvation Army offices to find out what type of supplies were needed most, the team collected children's clothing, cleaning products, toys, and other items. "We collected diapers, mops, you name it," Galvan says. "People also donated $500 worth of gift cards, which were distributed directly to Eatontown area families who needed help."

To solicit donations, he emailed some 300 employees and posted a notice in an internal company newsletter. Donation boxes were set up in MITRE's McLean offices during December.

"We thought it made sense to kick off our collection during our division holiday parties, and we got a great response," says MITRE strategic communications lead Holly Rapport.

Rapport teamed up with information systems engineer Theda Parrish and office administrator Helen Pullen to sort and organize the donations. Once the items were collected, Galvan rented a 16-foot truck and drove them, with John Geraghty, a MITRE department head, from McLean to the Salvation Army center in Trenton, N.J. There, they met up with staff from Eatontown who collected the gift cards to bring back and distribute. At the same time, John Knapp, an information systems engineer in Eatontown, had launched a page on MITRE's internal social network, Handshake, for MITRE and Veterans Affairs staff to collaborate on direct cleanup efforts along the Jersey Shore. "Once we all got our own power back on, we decided we should help the folks who were still struggling," he says.

Throughout December, a hardy group of about 15 MITRE volunteers set out to do demolition work, sand removal, and related work on Saturdays. Knapp and his colleagues were connected with specific homeowners needing demolition help by a Manasquan, N.J.-based relief organization that had taken charge of coordinating volunteers in the area.

"The work mostly involved ripping up floors and removing sheet rock and tile," he says. "It was some heavy lifting work."

Writing on a site dedicated to Sandy relief on Handshake, volunteer Joyce Byrne, a systems engineer in Eatontown, detailed one "back-breaking" effort by the team to clean up a storm-ravaged home in Manasquan in December:

Our assignment was to remove the hardwood floors in the two back bedrooms. Both bedrooms had furniture in them, some quite water-damaged. The plan was to move all the furniture from the back bedrooms into the dining room and remove the hardwood floor from both bedrooms. Once we got the first room cleared of furniture we cut the flooring about two feet from the wall and started removing the tongue-and-groove hardwood one board at a time. Now this hardwood was not installed with modern nails, but with mammoth cut nails that could pass as railroad ties. Board by board, two-foot section by two-foot section, Flintstone-size cut nail by Flintstone-size cut nail, we removed the floor, alternating tasks amongst the group between pulling up the boards, pulling the nails, and carrying the boards and debris out. Four hours after starting we had both rooms cleared.

Next up for the volunteer team will be a beach cleanup effort in the Asbury Park area, Knapp says. "The expectation is we will continue to look for opportunities in the area. There's a lot of work left to be done."

To Galvan, the ongoing effort shows MITRE at its finest. "The important message is that these are great MITRE people who wanted to make sure the folks affected by Sandy weren't forgotten," he says.

(Editor's note: Aside from those mentioned above, the team that worked on the effort included the following: Bill Burns, Pat Mahoney, Brenda Klafter, Buddy Franklin, Ronnie Daldos, Anne Rugo, Rich Piccola, Jeff Harrold, Margarita Lee, and Ron Candrea.)

—by Maria S. Lee

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