Residents of the Bayview area of San Francisco are turning lessons from a hurricane that struck 2,000 miles away into local action. (Simon Tunbridge/ flickr/ cc) 

San Francisco, United States — Everyone here assumes that an earthquake will hit this city hard some day, thanks to the geologic fault line that runs below it. But G.L. Hodge is not afraid.

Hodge has a talent for being where he’s needed during a crisis. During the last big quake to rattle the San Francisco Bay area in 1989, Hodge was the manager of a local Kmart store across the bay in the town of Fremont. He made sure that his store was one of the first in the area to re-open after the quake, distributing much-needed supplies to the community.

Two-and-a-half years later, Hodge had moved to Los Angeles to manage another Kmart in Compton. When riots broke out after police officers were acquitted in a racially charged beating, Hodge’s store was one of the few in the neighborhood not to be looted. The National Guard used it as a command center.

“I’ve been dealing with these kind of situations for a long time,” Hodge says. As a retail store manager, Hodge had to be prepared for anything. Over the years, he also picked up disaster preparedness tips from his wife, a San Francisco firefighter.

Now retired from retail, Hodge is putting his preparedness ideas to work at the Providence Baptist Church of San Francisco, where he is administrator. Providence is a humming community hub in an area called the Bayview. Once known as a shipbuilding center, the neighborhood today has more poverty and unemployment than elsewhere in San Francisco. About one-third of the residents are foreign-born and one-third are African-American. “It’s a 24-hour church,” says Hodge. He and his staff run a daily after-school program, serve dinner to the community on Wednesday evenings, and operate a food bank each Thursday. Each night, the church’s gymnasium is transformed into a 125-bed homeless shelter.

Those services aren’t too unusual for an American church. What is unusual is that Hodge’s budget at Providence also has a line item for disaster preparedness. The American Red Cross and local nonprofits have come to provide disaster prep training for the congregation, as well as free CPR training for church staff and the public. Hodge keeps a two-way radio in his office, enabling communication with a local command center in the event of a disaster. In his office, Hodge showed me a meticulously prepared kit that includes binders holding disaster protocols, contact information for critical neighborhood volunteers, and Bayview maps identifying caches of potable water and other emergency supplies....Continue Reading

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