Lake Charles non-profits help Florida prepare for Hurricane Ian

Lake Charles, LA (KPLC) - The next few days will be quite tense for the people on Florida’s coast as they prepare for the impacts from Hurricane Ian.

Organizations in Lake Charles said they are on stand-by ready to jump in to help.

“We have quite a few commodities on hand, we have great high water trucks, military 6 x 6 trucks that can go in really high water and rescue people, so we’re just, you know working on our equipment,” Sondra Tipton, President of Friendships organization said.

After doing this work for the last 35 years, Sondra Tipton said depending on how hard a disaster hits, they’ll gather a group of volunteers and head over to that area.

“Sometimes we take one of our ships, and we can provide housing for church teams that come in, because the teams will want to come and help but all the hotels are full and sometimes there’s nowhere to stay for hundreds of miles,” Tipton said.

Ed Bush, Executive Director of the American Red Cross in Louisiana said it’s all about creating a safety net for the people.

“9 out of 10 people who respond to a disaster with the Red Cross are volunteers,” Bush said.

Bush said they currently have at least 50 volunteers that would be willing to go to Florida if needed.

”That’s a big part of getting ready, its building that team,” Bush said.

In addition to getting people ready, there’s a side that deals with equipment.

”So in the Red Cross all of our disaster emergency kits, all of our cleaning kits, all of our comfort kits, we start filling up the shelfs with those,” Bush said.

Both organizations said while preparing it’s important, it’s still best to wait, until given the green light to respond.

”If you get ahead of the process and send these people there they can also then be affected by the storm,” Bush said. “it’s best to just wait.”

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