State church groups aiding Ida victims
After checking their vehicles and pausing for prayer, the first wave of Arkansas Baptist disaster relief volunteers pulled out of North Little Rock on Wednesday morning and headed toward storm-ravaged Louisiana.
Members of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention had been summoned to help the Red Cross feed people in Hammond, a city of 19,584 people roughly 50 miles northwest of New Orleans.
As members of the vanguard, their first task was to deliver and set up a mobile cooking unit. Roughly 30 cooks, servers and other Arkansas volunteers were scheduled to hit the road Friday.
“This will be a pretty sizable deployment for feeding,” said Randy Garrett, the convention’s disaster relief coordinator.
Arkansas United Methodist relief officials said they are also gearing up, and will answer the call if summoned.
The Arkansas Baptists are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a longtime working relationship with the Red Cross. During the 2005 hurricane season alone, Southern Baptists helped prepare and serve more than 10 million meals.
The length of the latest mission had not been determined. Given the size of the storm, Garrett predicted it would be “very long.”
Asked what conditions he anticipated, Garrett said, “No electricity. Very humid. Very hot. It’s just a mess.”
Hurricane Ida, with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph when it made landfall Sunday, left Hammond and the rest of Tangipahoa Parish without power.
Similar conditions exist in New Orleans and elsewhere.
Trees are down. Houses are damaged or destroyed. Wind and floodwaters have taken their toll.
Officials have said it could take weeks before the electric grid is restored.
Home base for the Arkansans will be Woodland Park Baptist Church in Hammond, a sizeable congregation with a sanctuary just off of Interstate 12.
The Baptist cooking team, Garrett said, is just the tip of the spear.
“Here in the state of Arkansas, we have 50 different units that are deployable. We’ve got the chain saw teams, we’ve got flood recovery teams. We’ve got feeding teams. We’ve got shower and laundry units. We have chaplaincy, and we have our incident management teams,” he said.
There is also a communications team that can be dispatched.
The services are free. “We’re there to help them, and we don’t charge a dime,” he said. “We just represent Jesus Christ.”
The work is a ministry, Garrett said.
“When there is a major disaster, that gives us an opportunity to share the word of Jesus with people in times of need,” he said. “Everyone that goes, it’s on their heart to do that.”
Many of the people donating their time are retired.
“Our volunteers, some are a little bit up in age, but you would not believe the joy they get from going out there and doing what we do,” he said.
The Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church also has members who are ready to deploy, according to Byron and Janice Mann, coordinators for the conference’s disaster response ministries.
Within hours of the storm, the Manns were already in contact with their Louisiana counterparts, offering their assistance.
At that point, Pelican State officials were still trying to determine the scale of the damage and the priorities for recovery.
When called, the Methodists will answer, Janice Mann promised.
“We’re willing to respond to anything that they need, according to our capabilities and capacity,” she added.