Helping Houston Recover from Hurricane Harvey

Many of us have been following the reports this past weekend of Hurricane Harvey making landfall in the Gulf Coast of Texas. Arriving as a Category 4 storm Friday night with 130 mph winds, Harvey has now weakened to a tropical storm but is inundating the entire region with torrential rain. Port Aransas along the coast just up the road from our good friends in Upper Padre recorded wind gusts of 132 mph. Houston is expected to receive over 3 feet of rain before the storm subsides and catastrophic flooding. It was heartbreaking to see a reporter on TV standing in a foot of water at the intersection of La Branch and Lamar across from Discovery Green in downtown Houston just 7 months after our Future Flight installation for Super Bowl LI brought so many people joy in celebrating Houston as America’s 21st Century City. Our hearts and prayers go out to the good people we worked with on the Host Committee and the thousands of Houston volunteers that helped make Super Bowl LIVE a memorable experience and raised the bar for future Super Bowl host city events. We have been in touch with our friends at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and know that no challenge is too great to keep them from their mission to explore the vastness of space as the center for human space flight. The pictures of I-10 filled with pickup trucks pulling boats coming from Louisiana on their way to Houston to help with the thousands of water rescues happening every day is a welcome sight 12 years after Houston opened its doors to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Katrina.

You can make a difference right now with your donation to the American Red Cross (www.redcross.org) or other reputable charities providing disaster relief to those affected by Hurricane Harvey.