Hurricanes Katrina and Rita – PCS in Louisiana and Mississippi

Within days of Hurricane Katrina, PCS identified opportunities to join with other organizations so we could participate in the relief effort. PCS is providing substantial financial and logistics support in conjunction with Rolling Hills Community Church (RHCC), PRC Compassion (PRC), CityTeam Ministries, and the American Red Cross. In addition, we already sent several of our employees to the region and will continue to encourage our staff to go there throughout the reconstruction phase.

Our primary focus has been on partnering with RHCC in Tualatin to deliver food and supplies to PRC, a nonprofit service group that is distributing aid in the Gulf Coast region. Four PCS employees drove three trucks across the country filled with supplies purchased by PCS, including thousands of pounds of baby formula, non-perishable food, hygiene items, comfort toys, and critical logistics supplies, such as pallet jacks, hand trucks, and shrink-wrap. We then provided last-mile deliveries from the main distribution centers in Lafayette and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, directly to disaster relief sites in New Orleans, Metairie, Marrero, St. Bernard Parish, and Slidell, Louisiana. We also delivered supplies to Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, before having to withdraw from the area because of Hurricane Rita. Over the long-term, PCS is joining with RHCC to send teams of volunteers and supplies to the region to help residents rebuild their homes and their lives.

Dave VanCleve, Operations Supervisor at PCS, was on that initial trip. "What I saw on my final day in Biloxi will be with me for the rest of my life," he wrote. "As I drove around town, entire neighborhoods were gone. The pungent smell of mud and rotting belongings was almost overwhelming. I saw the despair in people's eyes as they removed their belongings from their homes and threw them into the streets for the earthmovers to clear away because of the toxins created by the storm. At the time, PCS was the only company providing trucks to PRC and going into the devastated areas with food, water, and other essentials for the people who lost everything. I am so grateful that I could be there to help and desperately wanted to stay another week (we had to leave because of Rita). I have never felt as passionate about a cause as I do about what PCS, RHCC, and PRC are doing for the victims of these hurricanes."

If you are interested in learning more about what you can do to help our neighbors in the Gulf or learn how your company can set up a community service program, please call or e-mail James Holman at PCS.

Portland Food Drive

Portland Food Drive – April 2005

In April 2005, Rolling Hills Community Church (RHCC) partnered with PCS to create a personalized, community food drive for needy families in the Portland metropolitan area. In just a few weeks, PCS developed a program, which included devising a system for collecting, labeling, sorting, and delivering the food. As a result, more than 3,000 families, mostly in low-income housing projects, received over 77,000 pounds of food in one of Oregon's largest food drives of the year.

To make it all happen, RHCC volunteers collected more than 5,000 bags of groceries and then dropped them off at the church to be loaded onto PCS trailers. PCS transported the food to a PCS warehouse, where hundreds of volunteers from RHCC and several PCS employees collated the boxes for each family. PCS then transported the completed boxes to RHCC. Finally, hundreds of volunteers spread across the region to hand-deliver the boxes to the recipients.