Dear Rotary District 9920 Family.
As you have no doubt seen we are experiencing some very serious flooding here in Auckland and Northland.
A State of Emergency has been declared for Auckland for the next 7 days.
On behalf of District 9920 I would like to express my concern for all of our members and families and hope you are safe and dry tonight.
Rotarians and Rotary Clubs will no doubt be keen to assist their members and the community at large in the coming days and weeks.
I thought it would be prudent to give some advice to Clubs as to what you could be doing and how Rotary Clubs can assist each other in collaborating on a response to the damage.
Our initial priority is the safety of our members and their families. I would encourage you to reach out to all your members to find who has any damage and what help they might need cleaning up and recovering.
Please also consider your own safety and don't put yourself at risk helping others or get in the way of Civil Defence who will take the lead in the work over the next few days.
Once things are safe and you are considering helping other Rotarians or their families clean up their properties, it would be great to share our combined resources. To that end we would like to use the Rotary District 9920 members Facebook group to communicate the needs for assistance in the Rotary family. Please help other Rotarians who aren't in this group to post any requests.
For example, if you need tools, a water blaster, towels or other equipment, there is bound to be another Rotarian nearby that can assist.
Once the situation is clearer there may be other opportunities for Rotary Clubs to help the general public where this doesn't conflict with Civil Defence's work.
We will provide an update about opportunities for this in the coming days. If you have any suggestions or ideas please email me at asmith@rotarydistrict9920.org
You might like to reach out to other community organisations you work with to see what help they might need and feel free to communicate this back to our network via this site.
Stay safe
Governor Allan Smith