More than 700 students, faculty and staff registered with Volunteer LSU to work around the clock at the PMAC and near the AgCenter in preparation for Hurricane Gustav.The PMAC is being used as a special needs shelter staffed with about 79 medical personnel, and the area near the AgCenter is being used as a bus triage zone.Michael Rhea, student director of Volunteer LSU, visited both medical locations several times Sunday. He said the volunteers seem eager to help out.”I think the general feeling kind of ebbs and flows, if you will,” he said. “Sometimes it’s very hectic, and sometimes it’s very calm. But everybody is always focused.”Rhea said the triage area is the first stop for buses transporting evacuees from New Orleans and the lower Louisiana parishes. He said doctors and nurses evaluate the patients based on their medical needs.”If they deem a person unable to travel past this point, they’ll take them off the bus with a caregiver and put them on a van or an ambulance or whatever vehicle that may be and send them either to a hospital or the PMAC,” Rhea said.Duties for each volunteer are allocated by doctors and nurses according to the need.”We’re here to serve,” said K.C. White, University dean of students. “It’s not about us. It may mean emptying bedpans; it may mean folding towels; it may mean taking out the trash — nobody’s above that. We need to do whatever it takes because it’s going to help the greater good, and that’s how we serve Louisiana. That’s what we’ve got to do.”Jacob Brumfield, associate director of Campus Life, said memories of Hurricane Katrina are still fresh in the minds of volunteers.”It’s just that reality of what we live with along the Gulf Coast and knowing that there’s something they can do besides sit and worry, something they can do besides evacuate [and] something they can do besides just not know what to do I think is a tremendous feeling,” he said.
 
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Contact Angelle Barbazon at [email protected]