CAMP BLANDING – It’s rare when a group of Greyshirts, as they are known, get together when there’s power, standing trees, running water and no mayhem.

Volunteers with Team Rubicon are used to responding to disasters. A group of 48 leaders from North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Puerto Rico met at Camp Blanding for three days of training and information exchange, each knowing their next deployment is a phone call away.

“We try, at least on an annual basis, to gather our volunteer leaders for a meet and greet, to share knowledge, stories, changes in procedural things, updates on the organization, all that kind of stuff,” said Jim Laman, Team Rubicon's Southeast Operations Manager.

Team Rubicon is a veteran-led humanitarian disaster response organization that serves global communities before, during and after disasters and crises.

The organization was founded when William McNulty and Jacob "Jake" Wood took a medical team into Port-au-Prince, Haiti, three days after the 2010 earthquake. Since then, Team Rubicon has grown to more than 200,000 volunteers in the United States and has responded to more than 1,200 operations around the world.

The summit at Camp Blanding was supposed to have more Greyshirts, but some were deployed to the Northern Mariana Islands following the devastating Super Typhoon Sinlaku in the Pacific on April 14-15.

Those at Camp Blanding attended breakout sessions like Geospatial Capabilities for Disaster Response, EMS Tips and Tricks, Stop the Bleed, Before Disaster Strikes: Advance Recon, From Alert to Action: Mastering the Quick Reaction Force Process, Disaster Operations Management and Having Hard Conversations.

Team Rubicon spent 215 days responding to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. In all, 757 volunteers combined to spend more than 44,000 hours toward the cleanup and restoration.

“The need has always been there,” Laman said. “I think as we've grown and over the years, we've been able to do more with more.

“As we get larger, as we have more support, as we're able to get out and do things faster, [it's] really grown kind of our name over the past 16 years to where folks are starting to recognize who we are when we come into communities. We’ve kind of really built a stronger standing with local municipalities and emergency managers to where they trust us to do good work whenever we show up.”

In the past year, Team Rubicon responded to 78 operations that included 1,173 Greyshirts that affected 825 communities, including a typhoon that struck Alaska, flooding in Western Michigan, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Texas, Pennsylvania and Washington, ice storms in Tennessee, fires in California and Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.

Locally, Team Rubicon members helped install smoke detectors in Baker County, rebuilt a home in Jacksonville for a disabled veteran, installed A.E.D. stations throughout public locations in Clay County, helped park cars during Memorial and Veterans Days ceremonies and assisted with the deployment and removal of wreaths for Wreaths Across America at Jacksonville National Cemetery.

“We have really worked on professionalizing what we do, to make sure when we do show up in these communities, they can count on us, they can trust us to do what we say we're going to do,” Laman said. “This [the Conference] is not a social event. This is educational. We’re getting stuff done.”

Because the next storm is just a phone call away.