Hurricane Laura - Woods Family - Elton, Louisiana

UPDATE 10/10/20:

Friends-

As you know, South West Louisiana was hit again by another major hurricane and people are now back in crisis recovery mode. There are current immediate needs for:

Generators
Generator fuel and oil
Insect repellant
Water
Gatorade
Shelf stable food that does not need to be cooked.

If you can help, please help.

This storm wasn’t as intense as Laura, so hopefully recovery is much shorter and we can swiftly transition back to rebuilding.

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Original fundraiser:

My friend Sara Woods and her family have survived Hurricane Laura in Elton, Louisiana, but they and their neighbors need help! Sara has a long history of generously helping others through advocacy and fundraising for BIPOC in the Transracial Adoption community, and now it is our turn to help her. Even while dealing with her own property damage and caring for her family, Sara is actively organizing to help her community. She is especially concerned about her elderly neighbors who have no power and no generator to use, as heat indexes are expected to climb to 108 over the next few days. All funds will be used to help with food and supplies for both Sara's family, and the other families in her neighborhood.

In Sara's own words:

"We are all still safe. But even with the generator, it is still extremely hot. We can’t run the central AC and the generator can only handle one small window unit. We are in heat indexes of 95 right now and are expecting them to be around 108 in the next couple days.

Right now, we are also dealing with cell phone outages and strong bands of thunderstorms. So those of us who have roof damage, this is becoming compounded by these current storms.

Everyone is this area is expecting to be without power for AT LEAST two weeks.

Fortunately for us, Eunice is the next small city and they have power, we at least have some stores... if they have supplies....

So bottom line... it’s a disaster. There are people who are trying to stay in torn up houses with no AC. There are people who evacuated and now can only come back to “grab and go”. Those are the lower parishes where things won’t get back on line for at least six weeks.

People need tarps for their roof damage- and we need to have them sent in.

But we need tarps, generstors, food, gas.... we can take deliveries here in my parish because they cleared all our roads of major debris yesterday. So our delivery services will resume and be routes through Lafayette instead of LC.

Please y’all... there are families here with absolutely nothing trying to survive the aftermath. Our small community was tore up but we will probably be forgotten in the shadow of the greater tragedy in the lower parishes.