Relief supplies ready but blocked by flooded roads
Mobile kitchen units, truckloads of tools and thousands of supplies are ready to help people impacted by Hurricane Harvey, but there is one problem: Many of the trucks are hundreds of miles away from Houston.
The extent of the disaster caused by Hurricane Harvey and its remnants — which lashed hundreds of miles of coastline from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Lake Charles, Louisiana, flooded more than one quarter of Harris County, Texas, home to 4.5 million people, and inundated the Beaumont-Port Arthur area with more than two feet of rain in 24 hours — has made it impossible for relief agencies to help in some of the hardesthit areas. Trucks now sit hundreds of miles way, waiting for roads to become passable and for search-and-rescue teams to finish their jobs.
“The scope and size of the storm is unlike anything the army has ever experienced,” said Lt. Col. Ronnie Raymer of the Salvation Army.
Trying to navigate flooded roads and an ever-changing situation as levees breach, rivers overflow and tides change makes it too difficult and dangerous to even attempt getting supplies in. The biggest issue is that the storm just won’t let up: Tuesday and Wednesday, the Beaumont-Port Arthur area heavily flooded and rains drenched western Louisiana.
“We’ve got units set up as close as we can,” said Mike Ebert, a spokesman for the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Many of them are in Mississippi. The mission board has deployed kitchens traveling to smaller towns, including Rockport along the Texas coast, to feed first responders.
Some relief organizations cannot get supplies into Houston, where highways are flooded, and authorities are still searching for and rescuing people from their homes. Organizations that do not help with basic shelter needs will wait until the situation changes from a search and rescue to a recovery operation to help people with flooded homes.
“What we don’t want to do right now is get our volunteers in there and have them get stranded and need to get rescued and create more problems for first responders,” Ebert said.
Tim Haas, manager of disaster relief at Samaritan’s Purse, said the organization has more than 60 volunteers in Victoria, Texas, and another base of operations in the Portland-Rockport area. Three other disaster relief units — 53-foot trailers filled with tools — will be stationed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and ready to deploy when it is possible to safely access hard-hit areas.
Some on the ground in Houston would rather understand the scope of the disaster before things start coming in.
Anna Babin, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Houston, said because the storm is still unfolding, she is urging organizations to hold off on sending things.
“People keep wanting to send us stuff and bring in trucks and we have to say, ‘Wait, where are we going to put these?’ “she asked. “We’re still in the disaster.”