Residents, Companies Offer Help for Hurricane Evacuees

The Fort Smith community has shown an outpouring of support for the thousands of evacuees who came to Fort Chaffee from the Gulf Coast. There’s been so much help that it is hard to pinpoint exactly how many supplies, food, clothes and volunteer help has come from area residents.

“It’s been overwhelming,” said Kathleen Mullikin, missions’ coordinator for Grace Community Church in Fort Smith, which collected items for the relief effort. “What we have just done as far as collection, we have received $20,000 in monetary aid for all the evacuees.”

Jennifer Spence, a clerk for Sebastian County Emergency Management, said the scene at Fort Chaffee is unlike anything that can be seen on television.

“These people have no jobs, no money – none,” Spence said. “They literally walked in our buildings with the clothes on their backs. Some of them in their pajamas, barefoot.”

More than 10,000 evacuees passed through Fort Chaffee over the Labor Day weekend where they were given food, clothes, medical check-ups and shelter. Once they went through the process of getting identification, they were then sent out across the state to be housed until they can go back to their homes. Fort Chaffee is only able to hold 4,000 evacuees. More evacuees were expected to pass through as of early September.

Spence said that they have been inundated with clothes, but there is still a need for food, water, baby and personal hygiene products and money. As long as there are evacuees going into Fort Chaffee and as long as they are housed at the barracks, there will be a need for those items, Spence said.

Mullikin said since the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, volunteers at her church logged more than 10,000 man-hours. They have filled two 53-foot trailers and four 14-foot trailers full of water, blankets and hygiene products.

Mullikin’s church worked with Aquamena, a water bottling company out of Mena, in shipping water where it is needed. The firm has shut down its normal production to concentrate on bottling water for the relief effort, said a volunteer worker at the company. It’s shipping out two truckloads of water a day.