Ahead of Winter Storm Fern, our Appalachia team opened a battery library at our warehouse in Mars Hill, North Carolina, and preemptively supported the Buncombe County Emergency Operations Center, Black Mountain Fire Department, Swannanoa Resilience Hub, and Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance with power for communications at warming centers.

In Lake Providence, Louisiana, a small town in the Mississippi Delta where ice toppled trees and transmission lines, we partnered with Together Louisiana to power a warming shelter, heated blankets, and home health devices like feeding tubes, medical beds, and oxygen machines.

Power can protect communities. It can also terrorize them.

Early this spring, a series of tornadoes devastated several communities in rural Mississippi. We joined forces with local partners requesting emergency power: Delta Health Center in Rolling Fork, the Fannie Lou Hamer Center for Change in Eupora, and the Zion Baptist Association in Winona. These hubs would go on to serve as foundations of recovery and resilience in their communities.

A few months ago, long before a tropical depression that would become Hurricane Ian formed in the Caribbean, the United Methodist Committee on Relief decided to invest in resilient power solutions for their disaster response teams.

At Footprint Project, we focus on deploying solar generators to disasters in the domestic U.S. and Puerto Rico. Logistics, program sustainability, cultural competency, and overall need have always pointed us in the direction of our own backyard when it comes to building back greener - until Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Less than 24 hours after a rare, EF3 tornado hit New Orleans, Footprint Project was on the ground to provide emergency clean power for neighbors in the hardest hit area of Arabi.

While many families were preparing to wind down for the holidays (including the Footprint Project team), tornado sirens rang out in states across the southeastern United States. With at least 88 fatalities, the “Quad-State Super Cell” became the deadliest December tornado event on record in the United States.

Footprint Project has been on the ground in Louisiana since September 3 deploying solar + batteries to communities affected by Hurricane Ida.

As summer comes to a close, a new door opens. The largest mobile solar generator microgrid Footprint Project has ever built is bringing mobile, sustainable power to communities in Puerto Rico.

The completion of this microgrid is crucial for the island’s disaster relief recovery. As back-up diesel generators continue to fail when communities deprived of power need it most, a solar generator microgrid will provide reliable, sustainable energy to people who no longer have to depend on a failing central power source.

On Monday afternoon, the National Weather Service declared a one out of five “marginal risk” warning. They did not predict that a 100 mile per hour wind derecho would leave over 200,000 citizens in Iowa bereft of power. A derecho is a spanish term meaning “straight ahead,” and is defined as a line of intense fast-moving, damaging windstorms occasionally accompanied by thunderstorms. This type of environmental disaster is notoriously rare and difficult to predict. Although the average wind speed in these straight line storms is 50 to 70 mph, this derecho was particularly fierce, with a record 110 mph, resulting in hurricane force winds in Iowa.

Severe weather forecasts indicate a brutal 2020. The U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted 13-19 named storms, the majority of which will become hurricanes before reaching landfall*. As resources are already stretched thin in response to COVID-19 and the economic fall-out, first responders are concerned about what this means for disaster relief in places that are still recovering from past environmental emergencies. Recovery has been especially difficult on the islands of Puerto Rico.

Our base of operations has had an eventful and demanding early summer. While we traditionally respond to environmental disasters, our work in Minneapolis has focused on empowering our community in the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd. Footprint Project has partnered with community organizations on three solar deployments to energize relief spaces, memorials, and displaced-persons encampments.

In April of this year, the Footprint Project partnered with Global Response Management (GRM) to power the COVID-19 Clinic for the Matamoros Refugee Camp. The Footprint Project provided a solar tent and trailer which became the first operational Solar Powered COVID-19 Clinic supporting doctors and medics.

As COVID-19 began spreading across the United States in the early months of 2020, two devastating EF3 tornadoes hit Nashville and Chattanooga. These tornadoes rendered many neighborhoods and communities without shelter or power.

In early January, a swarm of earthquakes began striking off the southern coast of Puerto Rico, crippling centralized power production and leaving thousands displaced from their homes. Footprint Project’s responders were some of the first volunteers to begin relief efforts.