When American Red Cross volunteer Karl Matzke, from Santa Clara County, received the call to organize a team and deploy to Alaska, there was no hesitation in his decision to go. As one of the Divisional Leads for Operations Management, he ran the operations for the first shelter that opened in Alaska just three days after Typhoon Halong devastated the region on October 12.
Typhoon Halong was one of the worst storms to hit western Alaska since the 1960s. The typhoon brought storm surges that reached up to 16-feet and catastrophic flooding to over a thousand miles of coastline in the Yukon-Kuskokwim (YK) Delta, destroying hundreds of homes and displacing over 2,000 people. The Red Cross and its partners responded quickly to offer relief to those affected.
Drawing on his two decades of experience, which includes responding to Hurricane Katrina, the Southern California wildfires and Hurricane Sandy, Karl was tasked with forming a leadership team to respond.
Karl described the first steps taken to move the displaced people from their villages to Anchorage…