Kato Mivule
Kudos: This is one of the best Christ-Like Responses I have seen from Billy Graham et al, rather than BLAME the Hurricane on Gays, Abortionists, Muslim-Socialist Kenyans, and Liberals, they have decided to go minister freely to locals affected by the Storm...
Superstorm Sandy: Christian Relief Organizations Ready for Massive Deployment
By Alex Murashko ,
Christian Post Reporter
October 30, 2012|8:23 am
Several Christian disaster relief organizations, including those focused on providing emotional support to victims, announced yesterday that they are ready to head into the heavily damaged areas of northeastern United States in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. As the storm made landfall a little after 8 p.m. EDT, it was declared a post-tropical cyclone with damaging winds reaching lower hurricane strength.
"Three mobile office units will leave Charlotte tomorrow morning headed into the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy," stated the Billy Graham Rapid Response team Monday afternoon. "We will have teams on the ground within 24 hours of the hurricane's passing. Please pray for safety in travel for the chaplain coordinators who will be driving the mobile units, and the volunteer chaplains coming from around the country."The purpose of the response team, a part of the renowned evangelist's organization, is to "deploy chaplains who will bring a ministry of presence and prayer and appropriately share God's love, comfort, and hope with those affected by a man-made or natural disaster."
In terms of food and shelter relief, some Christian organizations such as the Salvation Army were already in place.
"The Salvation Army is mobilized and ready to serve," said Major George Hood, National Community Relations Secretary for The Salvation Army in the U.S. "Our mobile feeding units and staff are strategically positioned and already beginning to serve at shelter locations throughout the East Coast."
The Salvation Army maintains a fleet of disaster vehicles and supply warehouses across the nation to enable speedy mobilization. There are more than 300 emergency response vehicles in the eastern and southern U.S. alone and nearly 600 units nationwide.
Specific Salvation Army activities include:
• In New Jersey, The Salvation Army is serving meals, snacks and drinks at 11 shelters in five counties. A full fleet of emergency response vehicles is ready to deploy if needed. This includes 10 fully-stocked mobile feeding units (canteens), two service vehicles, and one mobile command unit. A canteen is embedded with Task Force 1, the State's official search and rescue team, at Lakehurst Naval Base and may travel with them as they are deployed throughout the state.
• In New York, The Salvation Army is coordinating with the local American Red Cross to provide volunteer support for shelters throughout Suffolk County. Eight canteens are equipped and ready to be deployed from the northern and western parts of the state.
• In Philadelphia, the Christian-based organization is working closely with the Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management and as of yesterday was preparing three shelters within the city to help ensure those impacted by Hurricane Sandy will have access to essential services and safety.
Shelter from the group was already provided in Virginia since Saturday. Relief plans and help are in place in North Carolina and Maryland as well.
The Salvation Army's mission includes providing a ministry of presence that gives compassionate care to residents looking for hope in the midst of turmoil. Pastoral care is available for all those impacted, but is not a prerequisite for receiving assistance.
Southern Baptist Disaster Relief leaders were ready yesterday for a large-scale response once the storm cleared, according to the Baptist Press.
"We worked through the weekend to make sure we have a solid plan in place," said Fritz Wilson, disaster relief team leader for the North American Mission Board. "And not only a plan, but we have already begun to make sure the people to work the plan will be in place to respond and meet needs."
Wilson transported one of NAMB's recovery units to Harrisburg, Pa., on Monday. Also yesterday, the organization said the Pennsylvania-South Jersey state convention's mission house in Harrisburg will serve as the area command center for the storm response. Given the wide range of possible damage and the potentially large area affected, Wilson said yesterday he fully expects multiple incident command centers to be established for the response.
Convoy of Hope's Rapid Response Team was in State College, Pa., on Monday. The team was scheduled to remain there overnight, then head east as soon as it's determined safe to assess areas with significant damage.
Around 80,000 pounds of additional relief supplies are in the queue and are tentatively scheduled to leave Convoy of Hope's World Distribution Center on Tuesday. The loads contain meals, drinks, cereal, trashcans and cleaning supplies.
Hurricane Sandy Threatens $20 Billion in Economic Damage
By Chris Burritt and Brian K. Sullivan - 2012-10-30T22:41:40Z
The total would include insured losses of about $7 billion to $8 billion, said Charles Watson, research and development director at Kinetic Analysis Corp., a hazard-research company in Silver Spring, Maryland. Much of the remaining tab will be picked up by cities and states to repair infrastructure, such as New York City’s subways and tunnels, he said.
Sandy, spanning 900 miles, slammed into southern New Jersey at about 8 p.m. local time and brought a record storm surge of 13.88 feet (4.2 meters) into Manhattan’s Battery Park. Flooding, high winds and fallen trees cut power to about 8 million customers from South Carolina to Maine, and travelers were stranded as U.S. airlines grounded more than 16,000 flights. U.S. stock trading is closed again today in the first back-to- back shutdown for weather since 1888.
Magnitude Unexpected
New York City committed $29.2 million to emergency contractors and the costs related to Sandy will probably reach “the tens of millions of dollars,” City Comptroller John Liu said. The city “will easily be able to absorb the actual cost of the clean out” and state or federal agencies will help cover the expenses, he said.“Nobody expected a storm of this magnitude to hit New York City,” Liu said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We will keep people safe, and we will start helping people dig out from this storm.”
Record tides from the storm combined with hours of pounding wind and rain to flood seven subway tunnels under the East River and electrical substations and shut down New York’s financial district. Power was lost in Manhattan south of 35th Street. Some outages were deliberate as Consolidated Edison Inc. (ED), the city’s utility, proactively shut off parts of downtown Manhattan, including Wall Street, and Brooklyn.
Infrastructure Damage
In the borough of Queens, a fire in Breezy Point destroyed 111 homes and damaged 20 more, according to Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano. On 57th Street in Manhattan, a crane on a 90-story residential building under construction partially collapsed and was dangling over the street.Heavy losses to public infrastructure would in some ways mirror the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans in 2005, said Watson, of Kinetic Analysis. Katrina was the nation’s most costly natural disaster with an estimated $41.1 billion in insured property losses, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
“It kind of reminds me of Katrina, the actual wind damage from Katrina and coastal storm surge damage was easy to pull down,” Watson said. “But once you start getting water going over your protective measures and getting into your infrastructure the numbers start to go crazy.”
Insured Losses
Eqecat’s Keogh reiterated today his estimate that Sandy would cause as much as $20 billion of economic damage with about $5 billion to $10 billion of that in insured losses. It may take six months to a year to nail down precise costs, he said.The superstorm may have caused insured losses of as much as $15 billion in the U.S., according to modeling firm AIR Worldwide.
Hurricane Irene came ashore in North Carolina in August 2011 and raked the East Coast to New England. It caused an estimated $4.3 billion in insured losses, according to the Insurance Information Institute, based in New York.
With Sandy set to continue as a non-tropical storm throughout New England over the next several days, economists and analysts have varying estimates on the potential damage.
The storm may cut economic output by $25 billion in the fourth quarter, according to Gregory Daco, a U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. He said that could reduce the annual pace of growth to between 1 percent and 1.5 percent from his earlier estimate of 1.6 percent.
Sandy ultimately may subtract 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points from U.S. gross domestic product in the fourth quarter as spending drops on services such as restaurant meals, according to Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. The economy, with annualized GDP of $13.6 trillion, expanded at a 2 percent pace in the third quarter.
Airports Closed
New York’s main airports may stay closed until Nov. 1 after flooding inundated the runways, extending the travel disruptions centered on the busiest U.S. aviation market.“Substantial” flooding occurred at New York’s Kennedy and LaGuardia airports and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty, Andrea Huguely, a spokeswoman for AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, said today.
Boeing Co. (BA), the world’s largest aerospace and defense company, said work will resume at 11 p.m. local time at its plant near Philadelphia, where about 6,000 employees build H-47 Chinook helicopters and V-22 Ospreys.
The company hasn’t yet decided when to re-open sites in Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey where about 4,000 work at the various headquarters for cyber-security, government-operations and the Network & Space Systems divisions. There was no notable damage from the storm, which forced the company to suspend operations in the region yesterday, Damien Mills and Jenna McMullin, spokespeople for Chicago-based Boeing, said by e-mail.
Atlantic City
Tropicana Entertainment Inc. (TPCA)’s casino in Atlantic City suffered “very minor damage,” which appears to be the case with other gambling properties, Tropicana Chief Executive Officer Anthony Rodio said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. He based his assessment on conversations with other casino executives.It’s possible the city’s casinos may open as soon as Nov. 1 if state of emergency and evacuation orders are lifted, Rodio said. Operators need a notice of about 24 hours to get staff in place, he said.
Rodio declined to estimate the financial impact of the storm, saying he thinks investors will view storm-related closings as a “one-time occurrence.”
Home Depot Inc. (HD) and Lowe’s Cos., the largest U.S. home improvement retailers, said today they reopened most of the stores they had closed as Sandy approached. They reported glass broken by wind, leaky roofs and other water damage.
“We are starting to see some customers come into the stores,” Aaron Flowe, president of Home Depot’s northern division, said today by telephone from company headquarters in Atlanta. “The storm is still occurring. There is still a lot of rain and even wind. Slowly as the storm moves to the north, we’ll get more and more customers out.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Chris Burritt in Greensboro at cburritt@bloomberg.net; Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net
