As hurricane winds and rain pounded the South again, Alabama Baptists were poised to respond to a multitude of needs.
At press time, a large contingency of state Baptists was sitting on go in Louisiana to move into Texas in the wake of Hurricane Ike, said Tommy Puckett, state disaster relief director.
“We were asked to send our state feeding unit out to Texas to set up an entire camp that would involve our feeding, communication, shower, chain-saw and possibly laundry units,” he said. “We were to be ready to feed 20,000 meals per day.”
At press time, Ike was projected to make landfall in Texas Sept. 12 or 13. Puckett said he wasn’t sure yet of the exact location where the team would be needed.
A second team of 30 Alabama Baptists was also set to feed evacuees from a Salvation Army 18-wheeler in San Antonio, Texas.
As Southern Baptist volunteers are called upon once again, teams are facing fatigue, said Mickey Caison, the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) adult volunteer mobilization team leader and director of operations at the Southern Baptist Disaster Operations Center.
“We’ve been going at it hard all year with tornadoes and floods and ice storms. So we’ve been in a response somewhere all year long. And a lot of those volunteers have used their vacation days already,” Caision said.
About 67 Southern Baptist disaster relief units from 16 state conventions have been serving in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall in that state Sept. 1.
Many of those units were poised to move if necessary in order to seek protection from Ike’s fury, and officials at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary were watching the storm closely as well.
Classes had resumed Sept. 9 at the seminary after closing to evacuate for Gustav.
In Louisiana, Alabama Baptists are among those still helping in Gustav’s aftermath.
“We have a team of five over there in Baton Rouge right now serving alongside a feeding unit from Arizona,” Puckett said.
At press time, he was also preparing six or seven chain-saw teams to respond to NAMB’s call for cleanup crews for Gustav damage in Louisiana.
“We’re just waiting to hear where our teams will be able to stay,” he said.
A Southern Baptist disaster assessment team will also enter Cuba the week of Sept. 15 to consult with local Baptist partners about relief efforts needed in the wake of two hurricanes striking the island nation.
Gustav roared over western Cuba Aug. 31 with maximum winds reaching 200 miles an hour, according to news reports.
An estimated 130,000 homes were damaged and crops were wiped out before Ike struck Sept. 8.
That storm pushed along the length of Cuba before briefly moving offshore and turning back onto land southwest of Havana.
Ike also raked the Bahamas and brought new flooding to Haiti, which was inundated by Hurricane Hanna the previous week. (TAB)
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