Advice for US churches from a disaster researcher who lived through Katrina.
If current projections hold true, Hurricane Harvey will be one of the biggest hurricanes to strike the United States since Katrina hit in 2005.
A decade ago, maybe your church volunteered, planned a short-term mission trip, gave money, or helped rebuild Gulf Coast communities beaten down by one of America’s most deadly and destructive disasters.
Harvey offers Christians a chance to be even more helpful—to show God’s grace and mercy to a disaster-filled world. But it means we have to be willing to learn from experiences like Katrina. Read More
I rode out Hurricane Katrina at my aunt’s house in Angie, Louisiana in 2005. My aunt and my mother, her older sister, who lived with my aunt, refused to evacuate. My cousin’s wife who also lived in Angie did not want to leave her mother-in-law. She also had nowhere to go. My cousin who had been offshore had been evacuated from the oil rig on which he worked but had been unable to return home due to the traffic congestion caused by the people fleeing the storm. Since my aunt and my mother refused to budge, I stayed with them. They both were elderly. My mother was 92 when she died in 2013, eight years after Hurricane Katrina.
We were on the “good” side of the hurricane, the side that had the weakest winds and did not receive the full brunt of the storm. The winds on the “good” side of the hurricane were strong enough to uproot and overturn the pecan trees that lined both sides of the street on which my aunt lived so that it was impossible to drive down the street. When the storm was at its height, the rain was falling sideways, parallel to the ground, and the air was filled with flying debris. Rain water poured through a roof leak in the kitchen and the wind at one point lifted up the roof and almost tore it off the building. The oak tree that overhung my aunt’s driveway split apart and a fork of the tree came crashing down onto her truck. Miraculously the truck was spared any damage, a fact that we did not discover until the next day. We had running water but no electricity and a limited supply of food.
My aunt clung to the belief that we had nothing to worry about and that it would be just a matter of time before rescuers would be knocking at the door. All we needed to do was sit and wait for them to arrive. When I worked for the State of Louisiana, I had been trained as an emergency responder in the event of a hurricane, flood, tornado, or other natural disaster and did not share her optimistic view. I made several forays out of the house on foot to the center of the town where the Red Cross had set up a food and water distribution point and brought back supplies to the house. After the town workers had removed the fallen trees from the street, I drove to the only gas station that was operating. Cars were lined up down the street and the operator of the gas station was carrying a rifle. People had filled up cans of gas at a gas station in Bogalousa only to have them stolen from their cars or trucks. Due to the shortage of gas we were not allowed to fill our tanks. I would pick up supplies from the distribution point that had been opened at the minimum security prison in the area after the area’s highways had been reopened. The prisoners were doing their part, unloading supplies from the trucks and distributing them to those who needed them.
Several days after the storm a team of church volunteers from Baton Rouge equipped with a mobile kitchen arrived in Angie. With the help of members of the local Baptist church they brought hot meals to the older residents of the town who had not evacuated and whose electricity had not been restored. These folks my aunt saw as the rescuers that she believed would eventually show up at her door. While the hot meals were welcomed and appreciated, these folks were really a part of a later stage of the hurricane relief effort. The folks who cleared the highways and streets, brought in box loads of MREs, bottled water, and batteries, and handed out these supplies; and opened their gas stations, ran electric generators, and pumped gas, were the real “rescuers.”
As well as serving as an emergency shelter during the hurricane itself, what was then my church, Hope Church in Waldheim, Louisiana, a rural church that met in a former café converted into a worship center, housed in its building teams of disaster relief volunteers from all over the country, who cleared away fallen trees and debris and put temporary “blue roofs” on storm-damaged houses and trailers; and prepared in its commercial kitchen hot meals for these teams, as well as distributed emergency supplies to community residents and fed hot meals to them.
Churches both in and outside the area hit by a hurricane can do a lot to help the people in the area impacted by the storm.
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