Our Chapter's Journey Through Irma
- Matthew Liebman
- Sep 15, 2017
- 2 min read
Last week was a big week for not only the Broward County community, but for Florida as a whole. At the beginning of the week, Floridians received the scary news that the category five hurricane by the name of Irma was going to approach the shores. This news caused a lot of anxiety and nerves for every Floridian. Many people flocked to Publix, Home Depot, Walgreens, and other food establishments to stock up on items needed to survive during the storm.
As well as, many school districts closed school to allow the Florida community to get prepared for the storm. This marked a time in Florida's history where the whole state came together to prepare itself for this tragic event.
Lucky, when the storm hit Broward County it was only a category four hurricane. With that said, the storm still caused a lot of damage. It caused major power outages, flooding, building damage, and even beach damage.
The damage that the storm caused made our chapter come up with an incredible idea. We decided to make a video with a message that encourages people to help repair the damage that was done by hurricane Irma. We thought this was a perfect video to make because one of Habitat for Humanity's main principles is to do things that bring a community together.
We shot the video two days after the storm left Broward County. The video features our president (Matthew Liebman) walking around Broward County looking at the damage that the storm caused. The video was shot and edited by talented head of media operations (Klaus Vaillant). The video is linked at the bottom of the blog, please check it out!
To help with hurricane relief, our chapter is currently trying to work with Hands on Broward to help with relief efforts because Habitat for Humanity of Broward doesn't offer disaster relief programs.
Looking at this event in a positive light, while this event might have been sad, it showed that when people come together it makes a community stronger, more durable, and more resilient. As the wise words of Helen Keller once said, "Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much."
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