DO-GOODER.(The Talk of the Town)(Dan Tynon's disaster services)

Dozing astride seats 62 F, G, and H on Thai Airways flight 775 to Bangkok the other day was a big, bearded man in a blue work shirt with "Red Cross Disaster Services" on the shoulder. His name was Dan Tynon, and this was his third ocean crossing since the tsunami. Tynon is something of a professional disaster volunteer, an unpaid career that started on February 9, 1971, when the Sylmar earthquake destroyed the Olive View hospital, near his house in suburban Los Angeles. A teen-ager at the time, Tynon ran to the site, helping to pull out survivors, and developed a taste for calamity. "It's something you get hooked on," he said, shifting enough to make room for a visitor on one of his seats. He has taken Red Cross disaster classes in such areas as first aid and mass feeding, and has signed up to be on a disaster-availability list. For the past eighteen years, he has done most of his relief work under the auspices of Rotary International, masterminding various clean-water and wheelchairdistribution projects in Thailand.

People who like to speed to the scenes of disasters tend to have jobs they can drop at a moment's notice; Tynon, who is forty-seven years old and lives half of the time in Los Angeles, runs a privateinvestment fund that trades in municipal debt and pays a small group of investors (minimum investment: fifty thousand dollars), he claims, "between fifteen and eighteen per cent." Managing the fund requires about two weeks of his time every three months. Having once worked as a contractor, he specializes in building-and-repair issues, and he has responded to everything from local fires to Hurricane Andrew and the Northridge earthquake. "What gets to you are the ones like this," he said, "where you can see in people's eyes that they've not only lost all their stuff, they've lost their hope, too."

Tynon was introduced to Thailand three decades ago by a Vietnam-veteran friend who described it as a sensual paradise. "He called me from Bangkok and said, 'Sell whatever you have to, but get here,' " he said. "After about a month of general debauchery, we decided we'd do it ...