Hurricane Harvey has the entire state of Texas busy preparing for what is expected to be a category three storm when it makes landfall this weekend. Multiple organizations are preparing for the hurricane including Texas Tech and the South Plains Red Cross.
The Red Cross’ emergency vehicle is ready to deploy to the Texas coast if they’re needed.
“The first 24 hours is so important,” said Red Cross volunteer Brad Larson. “If you can imagine, one minute everything is normal and five minutes later, you’ve potentially lost everything.”
The Red Cross has assembled of team of volunteers who are on call if the coast needs more help once the hurricane hits. One thing they help with is feeding citizens and first responders.
“We started to do some internal preparation putting some volunteers on alert,” said the executive director of the South Plains Red Cross, Laura Hann. “Communication with offices in the Gulf to find out what sort of needs they might need and projecting what they’re going to need.”
The volunteers could receive a call at any point. At that time, the volunteers will have only four hours to get everything prepared before they drive out to the coast.
“A call could come in at midnight and the volunteer team would come and get this car and start driving down to the Gulf so they could be there to help with that response effort,” said Hann.
The Red Cross plans on being there until their services are no longer needed.
“We want to really be there for those families providing them support as they’re starting to put their community and their home together,” Hann said.
But the Red Cross aren’t the only group heading to Corpus Christi. Texas Tech researchers are there collecting data on the hurricane’s wind pattern.
“The strongest winds are closest to the center but how those winds vary as you move away from the center that will feed into efforts to help improve wind shield modeling efforts and better models of what wind shield hurricanes look like,” said research professor at Texas Tech’s National Wind Institute, Brian Hirth.
Hirth added that this is one of the biggest hurricanes to reach Texas in almost nine years.
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