American Red Cross Sending 13 Local Volunteers to Hurricane Ida Relief in Louisiana

ZANESVILLE, Ohio- This past Sunday, Hurricane Ida made landfall as a powerful category 4 storm near Port Fourchan, Louisiana 16 years to the day when the infamous Hurricane Katrina -a category 3- made landfall in the same region. 

With 1,000,000 people without electricity in Louisiana, communities like Grand Isle being deemed “uninhabitable”, and many more with damaged or destroyed homes, Hurricane Ida has created a real humanitarian need in the central Gulf Coast. As a result, the Central & Southern Ohio Region of the Red Cross has sent 13 volunteers -one from Muskingum County- to one of their many Red Cross shelters in Louisiana to provide aid. The volunteers will help provide shelter, meals, and a safe environment to stay.

“Just providing that safe space, you know, that comfort, we always refer to is as ‘The best part of somebody’s worst day’. So when something like that happens, Red Cross shows up and they know they’re going to get a hot meal, going to have a safe place to stay, and then recovery needs after that,” Tim Callahan, Disaster Program Manager for the East Central Chapter of the Central and Southern Ohio Region of the Red Cross stated.

The Central & Southern Ohio Region of the Red Cross doesn’t just send volunteers to major hurricane disaster zones, they currently have people also dispatched to the wildfires out west, the flooding in Tennessee, and even small local responses like home fires. They expect to also need to send people to West Virginia and Pennsylvania with the flooding currently happening as the remnants of Hurricane Ida slide through the central United States. Volunteers can expect a minimum of two weeks helping the Red Cross when deployed and most volunteers spend 2-3 weeks on a deployment. The Red Cross is soliciting help in its endeavors to help the people impacted by forces of nature. 

“If anybody is interested in volunteering, we’d love to have people locally, or if you’re interested in the national deployments to any place like that the Redcross.org/volunteer is how to get started on that,” Callahan said.

Anyone interested in volunteering or donating can head to the American Red Cross website. You can choose whether you’d like to deploy locally, domestically, or both. Also, if you want to help the current situations out west or in Louisiana you can choose to be fast tracked through the training process in the sign-up process.