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Stanford Business magazine

 

San Diego Fires Ignite Volunteerism

Early in October, Daisy Gordon Crompton, MBA ’97, drove her stepson to school and then returned to her home in La Jolla, Calif., near San Diego. At least she tried to return. The street was barricaded because of a massive landslide in which six houses eventually were lost and many more damaged. Crompton and her family could not sleep in their house for another two weeks. Two days after their return, a series of horrific fires broke out in San Diego County, and Crompton spent the following week working 12-to-16-hour days at the county’s emergency command center as a volunteer. How did she feel after all that stress? “Lucky,” she said.

Crompton was buoyed by the fact that 2-1-1 San Diego, the county-funded nonprofit information and referral call center that she helped launch in 2005, came through the fires with flying colors. She had spent two years as project manager for the 24-hour referral center, overseeing all of the non-operations aspects of the launch—strategic planning, product development, committees, revenue development, marketing, website, and publicity. Two years later, she was the only volunteer at the county command center with the necessary background to fill in for their trained 2-1-1 disaster responder.

In the first eight days of the fires, 2-1-1 San Diego fielded 108,000 calls, compared with 125,000 in all of 2006. “It would have easily exceeded last year’s entire call volume if we hadn’t been overloaded,” Crompton said. “Once we successfully brought up additional phone lines mid-Tuesday, calls reached a peak of 25,000 on Wednesday, the fourth day of the fire.”

Overall, the impressive professional, volunteer, and corporate response to October’s emergencies seems to bode well for the community. “When the landslide hit, the city mobilized,” Crompton said. “It was like a rehearsal for the Big One.”