WPS Sets Up Help4Houston Trailer Donation Drive on Great Lawn

Westminster Presbyterian Church (WPC) has planted the seed for a community-wide effort to help Hurricane Harvey victims by setting up a Donation Trailer on its Great Lawn at 94 Tindall Road in Middletown. Texans all along the Gulf Coast and around the Houston area have been besieged by relentless rains and unprecedented flooding, suffering catastrophic losses. The damage assessment continues and cleanup is expected to last for months or even years.

According to Westminster’s Reverend Joseph Hein, “Our church was able to play an important role in the local Hurricane Sandy Relief Effort by helping many hundreds of people obtain essential supplies, weather the emotional crisis of the storm, and eventually recover and rebuild. Support for our victims here came from around the country and even around the globe. Now we have an opportunity to help other hurricane victims in the Houston area. We plan to rally the congregation and the local community to respond with compassion and generosity that will go beyond making a financial contribution to the charitable organizations who are down in Texas helping survivors.” Hein has been coordinating with Reverend John Roberts of Grace Presbyterian Church of Corpus Christi to establish a drop point for the Harvey relief supplies “Grace Presbyterian Church already has boots on the ground in Rockport Texas, near the epicenter of where Harvey hit,” Hein noted. Reverend Roberts will be coordinating the distribution of the donated goods once they arrive in Corpus Christi.

Westminster church member, Jim Davis, who owns Whirl Construction, was the driving force behind the project when he offered to put his company’s largest equipment trailer on the WPC lawn Great Lawn with a large sign asking the community to provide specific relief supplies including baby bottles and formula, diapers and wipes, mold-killing disinfectant, mops, brooms, shovels, dust masks, heavy-duty trash bags, work gloves, and personal supplies. There will be a designated parking area near the trailer and September 11th. A back-up trailer rig has been donated by Speed Global Services Trucking to store the anticipated high volume of donated goods. When the first trailer was set up on the Great Lawn late in the afternoon on September 5th, it was already 25% filled by the time it was locked up for the evening. The second rig arrived on site later that night and will stand ready to fill. One of Davis’s employees will drive it to Texas where he has a vested interest in helping the effort. A family member in Houston had their roof torn off by Hurricane Harvey’s high winds.

Reverend Hein is expecting the surrounding community to fully support the effort. “Even though it’s been five years since Hurricane Sandy hit, the devastation it caused is still fresh in everyone’s mind. People here know what it’s like to have their lives shattered by a storm like Sandy so they’ll gladly do and give whatever they can to help Hurricane Harvey victims.”

For additional information and regular updates about the WPC Help4Houston Project visit the church’s web site at http://www.wpcmiddletown.org/ or it’s Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/ WPCMiddletownNJ/ .