As a former Eagle Scout, 25-year-old Brian Barringer knows how to survive in an uncontrolled environment. But his expertise is camping and fishing in a forest, not wading in a sea of strangers displaced by two major hurricanes.

Still, after hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and pushed evacuees into Texas — and then Hurricane Rita struck Texas and forced them and a new wave of distraught people even deeper inland — Barringer knew he could do something to help.

After Katrina, he took a class at the Stockton Red Cross office, but it was not until Hurricane Rita that he got a phone call from the agency asking him for help. And just like that, he was off to Austin, Texas.

He arrived at the agency’s disaster headquarters, “where hundreds of volunteers were being checked in and randomly assembled into disaster teams. We formed teams of eight, exchanged cell numbers and picked a team leader then waited to be assigned to a shelter,” Barringer wrote in an e-mail to his parents Bill and Pat.

The next day, his team was assigned to a camp at a Pentecostal church in Lufkin, Texas, a seven-hour drive from Austin, near the Louisiana border. It was only four days after Rita, and the shelter was running at full speed, housing 800 and feeding another 400.

While no one knew exactly what to do after getting off the bus, Barringer was asked by an evacuee for some aspirin, so that’s where he started.

Barringer’s other responsibility was to watch after the evacuees in the dorms. Every day, he collected people’s bedding for laundry, fed the sick, asked about the needs of others and tried to resolve personal conflicts.

People had questions. Where is the government-promised FEMA aid? Where are the Red Cross officials? When can we go home? What are we supposed to do now?

The medical and health issues were some of the scariest Barringer said he saw. Many people did not have their medications, or had lost their prescriptions. Some had just decided to stop taking psychiatric drugs.

One of those was a man who attacked his grandmother one day after not taking his pills, Barringer said. The man was arrested, but returned the next day for aid.

Meanwhile, Bill Barringer, Brian’s dad, was watching news filled with reports of violence and looting caused by flustered evacuees in the Houston Astrodome and elsewhere.

But the father knew why his son wanted to possibly risk his life to help others,“He has a big heart, and he is a doer,” he said of Brian.

Barringer worked between 12 to 16 hours each day, but said he never got tired because there was always something that needed to be done. He said he believes the government was a little slow to organize the relief effort, but that it quickly recovered with the help of charitable organizations like the Red Cross and corporations like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, which donated money and supplies.

And the little things that volunteers like Barringer provided were also extremely helpful. He would find medicine, give people his cigarettes and let evacuees use his cell phone to call family members.

Every day, Barringer said he saw people reunited with their families, he became closer friends with them and his fellow volunteers, and learned something new.

When his two-week commitment to the relief effort ended, he signed up for a third week. “(I) wanted to see my new friends make it through all right, at least see them getting their money,” he said.

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