Even before Hurricane Helene made landfall within the United States, near Tallahassee, Florida, on Thursday, faith-based disaster groups were on the move.
Disaster relief staff from the Southern Baptist Convention shipped food and other essentials to Valdosta, Georgia, where Send Relief, a Southern Baptist humanitarian group, runs a ministry center. From there, supplies might be sent to the Gulf Coast and other areas affected by the devastating storm.
Coming ashore as a Category 4 hurricane, Helene killed 52 people eventually count and left tens of millions without power in a minimum of eight states across the Southeast U.S., in keeping with the Associated Press.
On Friday, because the storm headed north, SBC officials and leaders from other faith-based groups were holding conference calls and planning their relief efforts. In the early days of their response, together with assessing damages, Southern Baptists and Salvation Army officials planned to ascertain mobile kitchens able to turning out 10,000 meals a day in Georgia and Florida.
Two of the primary mobile feeding sites might be based at Baptist churches in Live Oak, Florida, and Perry, Florida, each inside an hour of Tallahassee.
“The Baptists arrange their field kitchens, begin cooking, after which Salvation Army field units gather the meals and distribute them into the communities that were impacted,” Jeff Jellets, disaster relief coordinator within the Southeast for the Salvation Army, said in a telephone interview.
The Salvation Army will even arrange shower units and other support services in communities affected by Helene. Other faith groups will send teams of relief staff with chainsaws to scrub up debris and tools to assist muck out flooded houses, and can provide chaplains to support those affected by the storm.
Jellets said disaster relief teams may find yourself working in communities farther north along Helene’s route as well, in Virginia and Tennessee, due to the extensive damage from the hurricane, which he called one in every of the worst storms he had seen in years.
The widespread effects of Helene will prove difficult for disaster relief groups. Normally volunteers and other staff come from nearby states. Helene was such a big system, nevertheless, that individuals are being mobilized as distant because the Midwest.
“This hurricane is greater than 500 miles across and can impact as many as eight states inside our territory,” Jellets said in an update on the Salvation Army’s work. “In my greater than 20 years of disaster experience, I can not consider a time when such a big area was in danger and The Salvation Army might be called to support so many individuals.”
Josh Benton, a vice chairman at Send Relief, said Southern Baptists have trained volunteers and leaders in each state and might draw from that pool of volunteers in states affected by the storm in addition to other states.
“That coordination allows us to reply in multiple areas,” he said. Though the Southern Baptist Convention is a comparatively decentralized denomination, with churches acting mostly autonomously, disaster relief, said Benton, is an instance where churches coordinate closely for the good thing about communities hit by disaster.
Benton said that Send Relief works closely with the Salvation Army and other faith groups, in addition to with federal officials, FEMA and native officials. Jellets, from the Salvation Army, said that faith groups are already coordinating their plans and can proceed to achieve this in the times ahead.
On Friday, the ministry center in Valdosta was already serving meals to those affected by the storm, including a family with 10 children who lost their home within the storm, said Jay Watkins, a pastor who coordinates the ministry center.
More than half of the groups within the National Voluntary Organization Active in Disasters, a network of nonprofit disaster response agencies, are faith-based groups that remain a necessary partner within the nation’s response to natural disasters.
“This is one in every of the darkest days in many individuals’s lives,” said Jellet. “When the disaster hits them, there’s an incredible amount of trust and responsibility involved. God opens the door for us to bring somewhat little bit of light into those situations.”
© Religion News Service
