When Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams arrive in the days following storms, they strategically set up Incident Command Centers at churches in and near heavily damaged areas to serve as bases of operations. It’s in and out of these command centers that all information flows — work orders, volunteer efforts, coordination of teams, feeding, equipment. They function much like an ant hill.
And when one of those command centers can’t function properly, it brings recovery efforts to a grinding halt. That’s exactly what happened at the Incident Command Center working out of First Baptist Church of Belle Chasse in Louisiana.
One of the Disaster Relief volunteers who had worked out of that command center tested positive for COVID-19 after returning home, which delayed the arrival of the next round of volunteers while the church was deep cleaned and sanitized.
Work is expected to begin again Sept. 14 with teams from Alabama and South Carolina.
