Boulder Colorado flooding (update).
(Photo By Andy Cross/The Denver Post)[/caption]
Disaster Tech Lab is in the middle of responding to the flooding which has hit the greater Boulder, Colorado area.
The floods have devastated the area with 17,494 homes damaged, 1,502 homes destroyed, 11,700 people having been evacuated and 1,253 people still unaccounted.
We have an advance team on the ground assessing the situation and trying to build a picture of the needs and equipment is being transported in from our depot in San Antonio TX. However as large areas are still inaccessible and consider the advice from the authorities not to deploy at least until the waters recede we are holding of on any actual work until the end of the week.
While we are setting up a base in Boulder we are also looking at supporting disaster relief work in areas around Lyons, Loveland and when it becomes accessible again Estes Park
Organisations on the ground can already lodge support requests via this link. Lodging request early means you will be at the top of the list once we commence our work!
Another point is that we can’t do all this on our won and we need your support! Even with all our great volunteers and equipment received from Aruba Networks we still have certain costs that need to be covered. At the moment we need to cover the following costs:
- Office trailer rental (1-2 trailers)
- Accommodation in Boulder
- Fuel
- Food to keep our bodies going!
If you or your company want to make a monetary donation you can do so securely online via this link.
In addition there’s an easy option to make material donations. We’ve setup an Amazon Wishlist where you can see a list of items which we need. You can then purchase them using your Amazon account and Amazon will ship them straight to us! Pretty cool! All you need to do is follow this link.
THANK YOU!
I wish I’d known about you earlier. We (TinkerMill, The Longmont Hackerspace) offered the city help during the flood but I think they were overwhelmed enough that the idea of deploying a bunch of tech folks against the problem didn’t take a priority.
So, two questions:
1) What could we have done during the crisis (while the flooding was happening) that wouldn’t have gotten in the way of existing response systems (and so we can prepare for next time)
and
2) What can we do now?