WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — For over a decade, Linda Nordman was on the end of a 24-hour emergency hotline for the American Red Cross.
At the drop of a hat, Nordman got calls from first responders, folks in need or anyone who had her number requesting assistance. It might be setting up emergency shelters for weather and power outages or supporting first responders stationed at crime scenes and during missing persons searches. Most often it was supporting responders and victims during structure fires.
“Everybody had the number because I gave it to everybody, anybody I helped,” she said. “And I just answered any time it rang.”
Nordman, 74, recalled comforting a mother following a fatal fire, watching as first responders searched all day only to find a body in the wreckage of a home and making sandwiches for three days to feed crews battling a brush fire.
“It was worth it at the end of the day when I helped somebody,” Nordman said. “It does more for my mental health than it will ever do for the Red Cross, to be honest.”
Nordman, who is now retired and lives in White River Junction, first became a Red Cross volunteer during the response to Hurricane Irene in 2011 and her enthusiasm for the Red Cross has not waned in her 15 years of volunteering.
What has caught up with her is fatigue. And she has noticed the number of volunteers in the area dropping.
She has handed in her Red Cross phone to the organization, but she is still always on call and regularly responds to emergencies in the Upper Valley. She fits in her volunteering around spending time with her children and grandchildren. Though she will always go to a disaster if she can, “there are times when you get call, after call, after call.”
Volunteer Red Cross disaster action teams around the United States are trained to respond to local emergencies to support disaster victims by providing money and supplies, and connecting them with other support services. They also support emergency workers on disaster scenes and set up and run shelters.
There are 36 Red Cross disaster volunteers across Orange, Windsor, Grafton and Sullivan counties who logged over 1,000 hours collectively in 2025, Jennifer Costa, a spokesperson for Red Cross of Northern New England, said.
Not all of the volunteers participate equally, said Lyndsey Morin, the Red Cross community disaster program manager for Southern Vermont. Morin is a paid staff member of the Red Cross.
“I do see unfortunately quite a bit of inactivity, but our teams that are active are very, very active,” Morin said.
In the core of the Upper Valley, Nordman and two others — George Sykes and Cristina Hammond — top the list of regular responders and are the only volunteers in the area trained for casework.
“Even if they’re super busy in their home lives, they’re always active. They’re always going to calls,” Morin said. “But, they’re getting called for all of them, so that’s what we’re trying to mitigate.”
The Red Cross always emphasizes that volunteers can say no to an assignment, Morin said, and encourages them to take care of themselves. When local volunteers aren’t available to be on scene, volunteers can meet with families virtually or, in less immediate situations, can plan a time to meet with residents when they are available.
The organization also recently hired a new recruiter in the area, and staff such as Morin have done tabling events to try to drum up volunteers.
The Southern Vermont contingent of the Red Cross, which covers Bennington, Orange, Rutland, Windham, Windsor and Washington Counties, has seen an uptick in volunteers recently, Morin said, but getting volunteers adequately trained continues to be a problem.
“In order to train these people for the … home fire response, there has to be more home fires and we don’t want that to happen,” Morin said.
Instead, she has been offering virtual or in person practice “to give these folks that are not always going on calls more experience.”
Sometimes, Sykes, a Lebanon city councilor and a Democratic state representative, will respond to multiple Red Cross calls in a week while also balancing a job at Staples in West Lebanon, being a caregiver for his wife and his political work.
“We are shorthanded, particularly in the Upper Valley. I wish we had a deeper bench,” Sykes said in a recent interview.
When the phone rings
When there is a disaster, first responders can call the Red Cross for support. Local volunteer duty officers then contact responders like Sykes and Nordman based on their distance from the incident. When the phone rings for a local assignment, volunteers have five minutes to accept or deny.
The Red Cross tries to keep daily disaster assignments within 50 miles of a volunteers’ homes, Morin said. But, with small numbers, that distance can climb.
In his 20 years of experience with the Red Cross, Sykes has worked in the Upper Valley and abroad responding to major disasters in Haiti, Puerto Rico and across several states.
“I wear a hat that has a red cross on it in the hopes that somebody will engage me and I can chat about it,” Sykes, who is in his 70s, said in an interview earlier this month. “They’ll see the hat and say, ‘Oh I give blood,’ and I’ll say that’s great … but there’s another side to what we do.”
Sykes started working with the Red Cross after retiring from the Lebanon Fire Department, where he’d been deputy chief, in 2006. Joining the organization was a natural transition and he “found that it was a mission that I could really sink my teeth into because it was so important to help people,” Sykes said.
Sykes worked for the first several years as a paid emergency services director coordinating volunteers around the region. After about five years, Sykes was laid off, but stayed on as a volunteer.
In 2010, he opted to take on what was supposed to be a one-month volunteer stint to assist with recovery after a catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti. He agreed to take on the assignment on a Wednesday and found himself on the ground in the island nation the following Sunday for what turned out to be a nearly two-year job.
“It’s an accident of birth that prevented me from being in these same circumstances,” Sykes told the Valley News while in Haiti in 2011. “And it’s that realization that gives you the energy to work harder and do more.”
After returning from his “transformative” deployment in Haiti, Sykes continued with the Red Cross and did several other week or month-long deployments.
In July 2024, Sykes spent a month running the team that went town by town across Vermont to catalog the impact of devastating flooding and its damages. Every day, he drove 50 miles from his Lebanon home to a worksite to manage the team.
But, like Nordman, Sykes’ most frequent responses are for disasters closer to home such as house fires.
Volunteers go to fires and meet the impacted residents. They assess the scene and learn about the family. Depending on the extent of the damage caused by the fire, Red Cross volunteers will give them money to pay for a place to stay or other immediate needs.
“The idea is to help them for the next two or three days until they can plug into some of the other resources available,” Sykes said.
While on scene, responders are also meeting people on “probably the worst days of their life” and providing comfort and support, Nordman said.
Providing that support can be difficult for Nordman who is self-described as “pretty emotional.”
She recalled one fire in Brattleboro, Vt., where she had to support a woman whose two daughters died in the blaze.
“It was hard, but I sucked it up and then I had to drive back from Brattleboro” to White River Junction, Nordman said. “That was a long drive. I cried the whole way.”
‘Paying it forward’
Like Sykes, Nordman’s personal ties to emergency response and a drive to give back inspired her to join the Red Cross.
Her father was a police officer and her late husband, a Woodstock volunteer firefighter. When a sledding accident left her husband severely injured, Nordman who was a young mother at the time saw an outpouring of community support.
“I just feel like it’s paying it forward,” Nordman said. “People have helped me in my past and I think it’s wicked important to pay back.”
Nordman began working with the Red Cross at an emergency shelter at Lebanon High School during Hurricane Irene in 2011.
“I just went to the high school one day and said, ‘Here I am,’ and I did whatever they needed to have done,” Nordman said.
For nearly three weeks she worked overnight at the shelter, helped with feeding guests during the day, cleaned tables and brought in supplies to entertain shelter guests. When Irene passed, she just kept on with the nonprofit.
Today, Nordman is the Upper Valley’s “canteen queen,” Morin said. Nordman prides herself on “canteening” for disasters, or distributing food and drinks to first responders on the scene.
When she gets a call, the first thing Nordman does is call a nearby business such as McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts to make a big order of coffee and food for the team and brings it to the scene. If it’s the middle of the night and nothing is open, she will make coffee using a Keurig in the Red Cross van and get supplies to make sandwiches and snacks herself.
She keeps a Red Cross van that is stored in White River Junction stocked with snacks and supplies to deploy at a moment’s notice.
‘A great resource’
For Upper Valley emergency services, leaning on the Red Cross can be a big relief.
Hanover Fire Chief Michael Gilbert said he regularly works with the Red Cross at incidents around the Upper Valley and services like canteening are crucial for his firefighters.
“When we have these calls, we don’t plan on if we’re going to be there for 10 minutes or 10 hours and we’re not going to bring food,” Gilbert said.
When responders like Nordman show up, “it’s a great resource and a great help,” Gilbert said.
And, the Red Cross’ role in assisting after fires to relocate displaced families, set up and manage shelters and provide resources is essential.
“We do the emergency response, but that recovery side is hard for us,” Gilbert said. “We don’t have that resources and they take a lot of that off of us.”
Despite the long days and nights, and shortage of volunteers leaving them feeling “burned out,” as Nordman said, she and Sykes feel a deep connection to the Red Cross and both take it as a personal mission to recruit more volunteers.
“It’s really important in life to have a purpose,” Sykes said. “For me, it’s to help people and to make a difference in my world and this is an organization whose purpose is to help people and make a difference in the world.”
The Red Cross accepts volunteer applications online. The application for the Upper Valley disaster response team is available at https://tinyurl.com/2nsrz9jd.