What an awesome day – we’ve reached a “turning point.”

City officials have really started to turn to and rely on Operation Blessing. As we worked, we gained the respect and favor with the local government, emergency management officials and residents.

Doreen, director of Emergency Management, Homeland Security, works with only three people on her staff. Today, she asked if we could help her distribute water because they were having a problem with people misappropriating it. I knew this was our moment. Doreen had a problem and thought, “OBI can help.”

I suggested storing the water in our new POD/Warehouse and distributing from there. As I shared my idea, I could hear her hope starting to rise. They turned over all of the “water ops” for the entire city to us. We will be storing and distributing the water for Terre Haute Emergency Management, Department of Homeland Security and allocating the water well testing kits from the warehouse.

Doreen ended our conversation by asking me to help them transition to Long Term Recovery.

We have also worked with Doreen on debris removal in the Toad Hop community. Working with the city, we used skid-steers to scoop up the debris. The waste will then be piled into 30 or so yard containers, which will save the county a lot of money by doing the work themselves. The county, in turn, will pay for the containers to be emptied.

Everywhere I turn people from Emergency Management to County Commissioners as well as the residents are thanking OBI and calling on us for their needs.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Disaster, Jody Herrington, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.