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IBM employees across the country have been aiding recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina’s deadly landfall in August. Numbers of them have been hands-on, bringing relief directly to those who needed it the most. In the process, they provided eye witness reports of the storm’s destructive legacy.
For example, some people might have been content to provide $10,000 for Katrina recovery efforts, but not John Spencer, a partner in IBM Business Consulting Services. He raised the funds along with 25 other IBMers. To have a direct impact, the team hired a refrigerated tractor trailer complete with driver. Then they loaded the rig with almost 44,000 pounds of ice in Atlanta and headed out for Gulfport, Miss. After some difficulty, they managed to get to an official relief point. Within three hours the icy cargo, all 6,000 bags of it, was gone.
Spencer said the television images of the damage in Magnolia State paint an accurate picture. “As we headed across Mississippi on Interstate 10 the physical damage as a result of the hurricane became more evident. The highway, 10 miles from the coast, had visible signs of overwash at several places resulting from the storm surge (tug boats carried into parking lots, stray barges damaging the highway bridge).”
IBMer Amy Knussmann was part of a convoy that rolled out of Georgetown, Texas, to Slidell, Bush and Bogalusa, La. They delivered supplies for more than 170 people.
Knussmann was awed by the destruction she saw. “Hundred-foot trees were uprooted, and the whole electrical system was pulled out of the ground. The town looked like a war zone. The obvious poverty was unreal. Trees are down or warped to the point of being horizontal to the ground. Roofs are gone, windows are out, power lines are down, streets are a mess. Cars had been thrown around like toys. Small planes were lying on their backs, tin buildings were rolled up in a ball, and houses on piers were leveled,” she reported.
And as thousands of former New Orleans residents sought shelter in Dallas, Bobbi Brown-Alexander found destruction of different kind.
Brown-Alexander works in strategic outsourcing for IBM Global Services and is Director of Outreach Ministry for her church, so she had some experience in delivering support effectively.
“I knew that people that were arriving by bus at reunion arena and the convention center were being processed and assisted. I focused on those that were not,” she said. “I found … a lot of people. The people left home before the storm thinking they would only be gone a few days. They have nothing to go home to. Their money had run out and they were hungry. Most had clothes. Clothing donations abounded. But they were hungry.”
She discovered similarly trying circumstances among refugees who had been processed by FEMA and placed in local apartment complexes.
“I’ve found tiny two-bedroom homes that have 20 plus people, one-bedroom apartments that have 18 people. This past week I cooked food and packed it into to-go boxes and delivered it to 120 people between two complexes in North Dallas. To say (the survivors) are traumatized is a feeble understatement. They look like they are in a daze.”
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