Joe Becker
Joe Becker
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We've learned a lot in the last months. We have taken a large number of steps to be better this hurricane season. We will be more prepared for the worst-case scenario.
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We will put in place in warehouses throughout the affected areas and around the country supplies needed to shelter 500,000 people. We will pre-position meals prepared to eat for a million a day.
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We are proud of the extraordinary efforts of the more than 225,000 Red Crossers who put their day-to-day lives on hold to selflessly help their neighbors in need. Some of them lost everything in these storms, yet they put the needs of their community before their own.
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We sheltered about 3.5 million people. The largest night was about 150,000.
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We have a long way to go in our fundraising to meet the needs of people from Katrina, let alone what we need to do for the people of Rita.
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Time is short between now and the next hurricane season. We are focused on how we can improve, and ask that every community review its plans. The time to get together is now.
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It was obvious even before Katrina made landfall in Mississippi that this storm was going to inflict a monumental blow to the Gulf Coast.
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At the end of the day, what really matters is people are serving me (the catastrophe victim) who understand me and who know me and who can help me. The rural congregation down the country lane should know that it can be part of the community's disaster response, and the Red Cross can help them become part of that response.
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We could wait until we built a system that was big enough to handle the demand or we could launch what we had and build it as we went along. Did we frustrate people? Yes. ... But we were out there and we were providing all that we could do with what we had.
areas quick
We had some areas that we couldn't get to as quick as we would want to.
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We are building an IT (information technology) infrastructure to be able to support 2 million families that have need of financial assistance and we will have that in place by July 1.
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This is the largest response to a single natural disaster in the 125 years of the American Red Cross, and there's no doubt it will set many records in terms of the length and expanse of the operation.
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They said they thought he might be a burglary suspect.
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The scope of this is just so huge. If you took New Orleans out of the equation, Mississippi and Alabama would be a bigger job than we tackled in all four of the storms that hit Florida last year.