WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Thousands of people are on day four of evacuations Thursday as crews continue to battle the Weaver Fertilizer Plant fire and it’s putting families throughout the community in tough spots.
While the Red Cross continues to operate an emergency shelter at the Winston-Salem fairgrounds, some families say it’s not the right environment for them during the pandemic.
“We kind of scrambled because we didn’t (know) how to deal with an emergency (like this), said Brandon Brown. “So as you can imagine with six children and my wife I’ll just on the fly can be a little traumatic.”
Brown and his wife took their six children to the Red Cross site but decided to sleep in their cars for the night because they were uncomfortable with being so close to others.
“Our children look to their parents to see the panic level,” Brandon Brown said. “We try not to panic we try to just keep calm and figure out our next move and they kind of go off your energy based off that.”
While at the site, the Browns met Carissa Joines who helped them find a hotel. Joines and her husband have organized and fundraised to pay for hotel rooms for evacuees.
“It’s just been really truly a blessing the kindness of our fellow neighbors,” Brandon Brown said. “They just came and decided to help and go above and beyond to make sure we (were) comfortable.”
Joines said her involvement started when trying to find a place for family friends to stay.
“As the night kind of wore on we kind of felt like things got set up with them, we knew where they were going I was thinking about there are a lot of people that still are not going to have the resources to be able to pull $100 out and do that,” Joines.
Joines said shelters like the one operated by the Red Cross are set up to handle large-scale, community-wide disasters, not specific-community incidents.
“We are dealing with a smaller population in our community and it just seems silly to me to not have people being able to sleep in a bed and have their own bathroom and be able to take off a mask and not worry about catching COVID from a random person that’s next to them that they’ve never seen,” Joines said.
The shelter, said Joines, is also not the best situation for people with disabilities so she wanted to make sure those individuals were being cared for as well. Even after they helped the initial people, Joines was also concerned for those who could not continue to pay for hotel rooms for the whole week.
“I know if there is a huge need in our community for people who we may not have seen initially,” said Joines. “They may not show up at the shelters but are really struggling to be able to accommodate what it takes to stay away.”
Crystal Barnes was staying with her family in a hotel, but as time wore on, money got tight.
“I thought when life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” Barnes said. “(The hotel had) a nice indoor pool for the kids and stuff like that but we didn’t think (the evacuation) would be extended past the 48 hours and (…) we had the money at the time, it doesn’t mean that those funds weren’t allocated for something else other bills and things like that.”
Barnes just put down her first mortgage payment Wednesday, but she can’t even stay in her home. She said she wants the City of Winston-Salem and the fertilizer plant company to be upfront about the dangers the chemicals could pose to residents.
“Being a cancer survivor I’m (…) kind of paranoid about my surroundings and things that I might be exposed to so it would be great to know,” Barnes said. “This is early in the investigation but as things move on we’d like to know what those other chemicals are and what are we at risk of.”
Others, like Dawn Kelley, were able to stay with family. She took her family to her mother's house in Winston-Salem Monday.
“Hopefully we’ve got enough stuff now to last however long we are going to be here,” Kelley said. “Good thing is she’s got plenty of space so it’s not extremely crowded but I have two kids and my husband and so it’s been stressful a little bit. I work from home so I haven’t been to work since Monday but my job has been extremely understanding about it and of course, there’s nothing you can do to be there it’s just kind of wait and see.”