My Red Cross Disaster Volunteer Story: Herb Brennen

Pictured: Herb Brennen (Right) and Don Brauninger (Left)

Written by: Rose Ellen O’Connor, volunteer 

Herb Brennen felt a deep emptiness when his wife Susan died of breast cancer 20 years ago. Then he gave up his job as a budget administrator at Lockheed Martin in an early buyout and he had unexpected time on his hands, which only heightened his loneliness. He was looking for things to do and saw an ad for the Red Cross. 

“It was after she had passed away that I got into the Red Cross,” Herb says. “Her death left a big hole in my life and I was looking for things to fill it.”

Herb was quickly hooked on the Red Cross. In 2002, he deployed to Louisiana for Hurricane Lili, the second most destructive hurricane of that year. Since then, he’s been on a dozen deployments to all sorts of disasters from wildfires and mudslides in California, to tornados in North Carolina and Tennessee, to hurricanes in New York and Florida. His shortest deployment lasted several days; his longest was two and a half months in Houston for Hurricane Katrina. That devastating hurricane struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005, packing winds of up to 175 miles an hour. It killed 1,836 people and resulted in $81 billion in damage. An estimated 1.5 million people were evacuated and tens of thousands fled to shelter in Houston.

Herb’s task on deployment is to arrange short-term financial assistance for disaster victims. Sometimes he’s removed from one-on-one contact. In Houston, he oversaw 400 people inputting data to set up financial assistance for hurricane victims and didn’t interact with them. Other times, he deals directly with the hurricane survivors. He sees a lot of desperation and is rewarded by being able to help.

“When you’re in a situation where people are absolutely needy and you’re able to give them a credit card and they can then use that money to provide for their family, the look on their face tells it all,” Herb says. “Relief. And gratitude.”

Sometimes his volunteer work can be very emotional. Herb recalls a mother he helped in Chattanooga, TN. He was deployed there after heavy rains caused flooding and mudslides. She had an infant, two toddlers, and was fighting drug addiction. She became very emotional as she told her story to Herb and he couldn’t get her to stop crying, so he sent for a mental health expert to help her. After she calmed down, Herb began to tell her that he was arranging a hotel room for her and would give her a credit card so she could buy food for herself and the children and formula for the baby. She was so grateful, she grabbed his arms and thanked him and became very emotional again.

“She started to cry again and I got emotional,” Herb recalls. “And the three of us were sitting there, all of us practically crying.”

Herb says most of the hurricane clients used the financial aid to get out of the shelter. Some used the money to go back to their homes and wait for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to give them money to repair their houses, and others, having lost everything, used the money to move on.

In September 2004, Herb deployed to Fort Pierce, FL for Hurricane Frances. He remembers giving assistance to a mother of three small children who needed bus fare to get to family who could give them housing in another part of the state. In August, after Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana, killing at least 88 people and doing $125 billion in damage, Herb deployed to Houston. Among those needing financial assistance was a homeless man looking for fare to another part of Texas where a friend was going to give him a job. In each case, the recipient of the assistance was, again, relieved. 

“Total relief,” Herb says. “Because they were broke and they had no way to get out of the shelter and they wanted to leave the shelter and the assistance gave them the means to do it.”

When Herb isn’t taking off for floods or hurricanes or wildfires, he works local disaster relief in Prince William County, VA. He responds to house fires about once or twice a month. Asked what drives him, his answer is simple.

“I think the same thing that drives anyone as a volunteer for Red Cross,” Herb says. “You volunteer because you see there’s a need and there’s something you can do about it. I think every Red Cross volunteer will tell you the same thing.”

Herb lives in Haymarket, VA. He has two children, Adina and Greg, and five grandchildren. Before working for Lockheed Martin, he worked for 27 years as a budget administrator for IBM.