September 2008 - As Gustav Approaches

I am writing the September blog a few days early since we’ve got the Labor Day weekend coming up. Gustav is moving toward the Gulf of Mexico and seriously threatens to wreak havoc on some portion of the Gulf Coast early next week. What it means for staff at the Bay Area Food Bank, as well as those at the food banks in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston and farther west, is a frantic effort to get our warehouses organized to jump into action as soon as Gustav makes its eventual landfall known. It also means staff members will be participating in conference calls through the weekend with State and Local Emergency Management networks to continue to plan for direct relief, should the storm impact locally, or support to our neighbors should the storm make landfall outside our service area.
While the storm tracks are very sketchy at this point, it looks like our warehouse, (and my house!) are at the eastern edge of the probable path. But, our service area stretches another 100 miles west, which makes it much more likely winds will impact portions of our area and thousands of people will be on the roads moving out of the strike zone. I’ve been exchanging warehouse status reports, contact numbers and plans with the directors of the other coastal food banks as well as the staff in the national office so everyone can be as ready as possible. Meanwhile, the staff has been busy distributing shelter supplies, topping off the tanks on all vehicles, clearing space for the arrival of emergency supplies and going through checklists to ensure we leave the warehouse Friday afternoon ready to jump into action once the storm passes, probably Tuesday.
The threat of a storm causes financial loss even if there is no direct damage to property and that’s one of the challenges we always face following a storm. Thousands of hourly workers will be forced to pack their family in a car, travel 300 or 400 miles inland and spend three or four days away waiting to return. Not only does this mean lost wages, it means hundreds of dollars for meals, gas and lodging. Evacuation for a storm can easily cost $500 at the same time a working couple loses $500 in wages. For a great number of people, this places them in tough financial straights and in the coming weeks we can expect the volume of requests for food from the church pantries that form the bedrock of support to increase.
Next week, you can expect an update telling you what Gustav has meant to us here along the Central Gulf Coast. It may find us busy serving local citizens. We may have staff shifted to a neighboring food bank. Or, we may all be happily poking fun at weather forecasters for missing the mark after a minor storm comes quietly ashore. We’re planning for the worst but hoping for the best.

August 2008

In past writings, I have mentioned the importance of the Farm Bill to distribution throughout our Central Gulf Coast service area. I’ve also mentioned our serious shortage of food due to a reduction of national donations, probably as a result of the declining economy, (is it a recession yet?). Two weeks ago, staff members from the Alabama Food Banks met with the State’s food coordinator and spent over an hour discussing the impact of the Farm Bill’s $50 million in additional food purchases for FY2008. Donny Cooper and his staff in Montgomery have used Alabama’s funds to boost Alabama commodities to 100 truck loads of a great mix of food that will begin arriving in September and end in December. That equates to 800,000 pounds of food coming into the Bay Area Food Bank, about a 400,000 pound increase over what we’ve been seeing. Although the final details are not known, we can expect a similar ratio of increase for our Florida commodities program, equal to about 50,000 additional pounds per month. This will finally boost distribution to a level between 900,000 and 950,000 pounds per month as long as we can keep our donated food sources sending items at the rate we have seen thus far this year. The timing could not have been better. In July we distributed over 750,000 pounds of food,
but only received 525,000 pounds, a situation that would have meant serious shortages if it had continued more than 60 days.
Our summer lunch program for children ended on July 31st. This year we supported children at 29 sites in Mississippi and Alabama serving thousands of breakfasts, lunches and snacks. It provided a great shake-out of our kitchen as a high-production preparation site and helped us understand how to keep food safe when transporting it up to 100 miles to our rural sites. This fall we will be using grant funds to hire a chef to help us learn how to use the kitchen for enhanced snack programs and help educate seniors and children on preparing healthy foods.
Hurricane Season has been gentle to the Central Gulf Coast thus far, but storm systems are beginning to form off Africa and march across the central Atlantic. The next 6 weeks are traditionally the most intense for storms so we’ll be keeping a watchful eye while we hope that Dolly was the one storm predicted to touch the US Coastline this year. This past month, I completed training in disaster response provided by America’s Second Harvest along with Marcus Ditty, our Florida Branch Manager. The workshops were funded by Dunkin Donuts and were designed to help train a cadre of people from member food banks who will respond to assist staffs in any location a disaster overwhelms local capacity.
We’ll have staff busy training on the School Year At-Risk snack program with the Mississippi and Alabama Departments of Education this month. Staff members will be attending the Operations and Food Conference in Chicago learning about trends in food donations as well as upgrading food safety standards. And, we’ll be continuing to increase our work with individual Sam’s Clubs, Super Target and Publix Grocery stores as we continue to boost local donations.