Hurricane Relief - What Would You Bring?

andyring asks: "In a few weeks, I will be going with a group from my church down to some of the hardest-hit areas in Louisiana and Mississippi to volunteer in the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. We will be there six days, and have 10 people going so far. At this point, I don't know much more than we'll be in either Slidell, La. on the northeast shore of Lake Ponchartrain, or Pass Christian, Miss., right on the Gulf Coast near Gulfport/Biloxi. Not knowing what we'll be faced with, and having somewhat limited room for supplies, tools and equipment (probably a U-haul trailer), what would you bring on a journey such as this? Any Slashdot readers between Lincoln, Neb. and the New Orleans area interested in contributing to our effort, such as donations of equipment/supplies/tools/etc?"

Comments

Re:take a brick wall, baseball bat

[Comatose51]

Amen! I volunteered at the Dallas Convention Center a week after the storm. I can't say enough times how I HATE FEMA. They couldn't get their network connections works for a few days so we ended up doing their job by registering people on the FEMA site on our donated computers. One day, they just commandeered our PCs.

One of them told us, "People don't need Internet and email. They need money!" Yes, they need money but they also need to find their family too! You have no idea how helpful the Internet was to those people in locating each other, even though most were computer illiterate and had us operate the computers. Many thanks to Yahoo and MSNBC. The MSNBC site was extremely helpful the first night they got to Dallas because the Red Cross site wasn't very easy to use. It was a general disaster victim registration site that was slow and required your mother and father's names. Then by other organization's good intentions, we ended up with multiple sites that we need to search to find people. Finally Yahoo stepped in and created a web search that would search all the major ones.

Anyways, to the original poster, if you have no experience don't go! Donate material and help collect them but you won't be much help.

Re:Boots not shoes.

[twilightzero]

Your comments are both intelligent and applicable, unfortunately they're also totally impractical. Habitat for Humanity has a very limited budget that's I believe almost entirely made up of donations. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have the money to put together 4x4 or 4x6 framed homes, but that costs TONS of money. Pine is the basically the only wood used for construction any more because all of the hardwoods have been priced WAY WAY out of reason. For instance, a 2x4 8 ft pine board runs around $3.50 or so. The same board of oak, no splits, would run at least $80 or so. I'm not talking a 5% increase, I'm talking a 20x increase or more. Even pine beams are exhorbitantly expensive these days.

There has been some talk of switching to either steel stud/joist construction or ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) for most Habitat affiliates, but both take a lot of planning and some specialized tools. Also both cost more than wood frame and therefore are rather sticky points for budgeting. The Habitat affiliate I work for has recently done two houses partially in ICF and it works very very well, however we had to raise the final cost of the house by $5,000 and I believe we're eating another $3,000 or so of cost just for using those forms. I sincerely hope they come down in price very soon because they're VERY stable and relatively easy to work with. But I'm babbling...

In short, we'd love to build something heavier, but unless someone ponies up the money for it and also sends the expertise to work with the stronger materials, we're stuck doing pine stick-built houses...