Calif. Firefighter Moonlights in Disaster Response

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Oct. 29--WATSONVILLE -- Watsonville Fire Operations Chief Bob Martin Del Campo was just walking into his office at Station 1 when he received the call in August to deploy to Massachusetts in advance of Hurricane Irene.

A few hours later, he was on his way to Boston, part of a U.S. Army "command and control" unit that provides support to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in times of disasters.

"We go into a place where there's a lot of chaos, and we're able to make sense of it," said Martin Del Campo, who holds the rank of sergeant first class in the Army Reserves.

Martin Del Campo, 48, described the work in Massachusetts as "leaning forward," Army speak for being prepared, "everything up and running."

His unit is attached to FEMA's Region IX, which covers California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa. It also backs up Region I in New England.

The Army only steps in when local, state and other federal resources are exhausted, he said. Then, it's ready to deploy generators to hospitals without electricity, medical supplies and equipment, too, and tents, flashlights and batteries, whatever's needed to sustain a community in the short term.

As it happened, Massachusetts escaped the worst of the storm's fury.

Other deployments have been more productive. In March, for instance, Martin Del Campo said his unit coordinated the return home of more than 3,000 military dependents, including many children, from Japan after a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami triggered a crisis at a nuclear plant.

He called it "rewarding work," a job that enables him to help thousands of people at a time.

Martin Del Campo joined the Marines right out of high school, and specialized in crash fire rescue during his four years of active duty. He served for eight years in the Marine Reserves. But in the early 1990s, when the Naval Air Station at Alameda was closed in a time of budget cutbacks, his superiors offered his unit jobs as cooks or truck drivers at a Southern California base. He declined and left the Marines.

He couldn't stay away from the military, and before long signed up to serve as combat medic in the Army Reserves. He said he had spent all his adult life in the military, and enjoyed the camaraderie, the uniform, the community service.

"I had a good job with Federal Express. I had three kids. I was proud to be providing for my family," Martin Del Campo said. "But I needed a little more."