Mother, daughter from Western Pa. volunteer to help those who've lost everything start to move forward

Amy Janocha sat across the table from a man who'd just lost everything.

It was June 1990, days after a wall of water roared down the Weegee Creek and killed more than two dozen people in Shadyside, Ohio. The man, Bill West, had lost his mother, father, grandmother, home and business in the flash flood. Searchers had yet to recover his dad's body.

Janocha, then a volunteer with the Red Cross, guided West through mounds of paperwork. When they finished, he gathered them and rose from his chair.

“Thanks so much for your help, Amy,” he said. “I'll see you tomorrow. I'm going to go dig for my dad's body now.”

Only once he was gone did she allow the tears to fall.

“How do you help someone that devastated?” Janocha, 48, of Robinson, wondered 25 years later. “Sometimes all you can do is listen.”

It was not her first disaster.

Janocha's mother made sure of that.

“My first one was the Johnstown floods of 1977,” said Phyllis Janocha, 87, of Rosslyn Farms. “My first client — she was in her early 60s, I guess. Small. Gray hair. A smile on her face.”

Janocha helped her fill out paperwork to obtain medication refills, then noticed the woman squinting.

“Did you lose your glasses, too?” Janocha asked. She had. So Janocha started that paperwork.

Then she noticed how the little lady covered her mouth when she spoke.

“Did you lose your dentures, too?” Janocha asked. She had.

She had lost everything, Janocha said, including her teeth. So she started that paperwork.

“When we were finished, she got up with tears in her eyes and hugged me,” Janocha said. “You know you're never going to get them back to where they were, so you get them back as far as you can.”

A school nurse by trade, Phyllis Janocha worked disaster relief for the Red Cross for 37 years and more than 60 disasters. She now volunteers at Global Links, a Green Tree company that collects medical equipment and supplies and donates them to countries in need.

Amy Janocha was a Red Cross volunteer for 25 years and 21 disasters. She works at the University of Pittsburgh.

Katrina, Shanksville, the Loma Prieta earthquake — the Janochas went, often together, and did what they could. At each stop, they learned that people react in different ways.

There was the flood victim in Massachusetts who lost every belonging but begged only for a replacement for her organ so she could continue playing music. Then there was the man in Hurricane Andrew, who ran around naked and claimed to be a psychiatrist, and the woman during the Great Flood of 1993 who kept calling the Red Cross hotline in St. Louis seeking help to find a date. “I was not successful,” Phyllis said.

At every disaster, she said, you see the differences.

“My brother was a POW who returned (after Vietnam),” she said. “Five and a half years. The soldiers were returning and I remember a TV reporter asking: ‘Was there a lot of personality change in captivity?' His answer was, ‘The strong got stronger and the weak got weaker.'

“I'd say that's the same with disaster. That's when you really find out.”