Twenty-one disasters. One record.

A Category 4 landfall that obliterated the ordinary order of tens of thousands of lives. Ground Force cleared miles of impassable road in the underserved north Lake Charles Gosport community on day one and never really left — removing trees and debris from hundreds of homes for the entire stay, tarping hundreds of roofs, then returning months later to re-tarp the same weather-worn roofs when no one else did.

Much of the work was the fine-touch kind only a lingering, trusted organization can do: reflectors along a 68-year-old widow’s driveway so she could back out of her FEMA trailer without hitting the ditch; fences repaired for a woman running the only animal shelter for miles; roofing nails hauled out of a farmer’s cow pasture. The community fed the volunteers back — baklava, jambalaya, free tires for punctured equipment.

Delta made landfall almost exactly where Laura had, six weeks later, on a community still living under blue tarps. Because Ground Force had never left, the response was immediate: volunteers performed water rescues during Delta’s flooding and the distribution center in downtown Lake Charles kept moving gas, supplies, food and water into the community without interruption.

The second storm is what turned a hurricane response into a year-long occupation of the problem. Roofs tarped after Laura had to be tarped again. Families who had almost recovered started over.

An unprecedented freeze hit a region whose housing stock was already open to the weather. Ground Force ran ice storm operations simultaneously in Beaumont, Dallas and Lake Charles, distributing hundreds of blankets and heaters and spending over $10,000 of its own funds putting citizens in hotel rooms rather than leaving them in damaged homes in the cold.

The largest single operation was a ten-day stand at Gallery Furniture in Houston with Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, which alone moved more than fifteen thousand bags of food.

The fourth blow in nine months. Ground Force again ran water rescues and pushed supplies into flooded neighborhoods, closing out a ten-month continuous presence in Southwest Louisiana. The May flood is what pushed the organization to formalize the model that everything since has run on: SAFE Camp — Swift Action Force Emergency Camp — a highly organized mobile response camp that can hold a position in a community indefinitely.

Ida hit on the sixteenth anniversary of Katrina, the second-most damaging hurricane ever to make landfall in Louisiana. Ground Force began prepping four days out and had an advance team in Houma within twelve hours of the storm passing. It became the organization’s largest sustained operation to that point — and Ground Force was asked to direct and oversee all volunteer efforts for Catholic Charities of the Houma–Thibodaux Diocese.

The mission to stabilize aging and vulnerable citizens was never clearer than in Pointe-aux-Chênes, home to one of Louisiana’s three state-recognized Houma tribes. Of the 120 indigenous families’ homes that had stood there for generations, 14 remained. Ida took not just their houses but their livelihoods — these are families who live off hunting alligator and catching shrimp, crab and oyster.

Ground Force purchased used RVs outright to house high-risk elderly survivors, ran a Trunksgiving with full Thanksgiving meal boxes and hot smoked meats, and held a Hope for the Holidays toy drive in December.

Ground Force mobilized in under forty-eight hours and arrived on 12 December, establishing SAFE Camp in the local Walmart parking lot. With temperatures below freezing and rain driving in on the wind, the distribution line ran on gloves, socks, hats, heaters, blankets and hot food. Crews removed debris and tarped roofs. Eight volunteers stayed through Christmas Day, on roofs.

Dozens of donated bicycles and hundreds of toys were laid out under the Ground Force tents so children who had lost everything could choose their own gifts. More than one parent stood there in tears.

The most destructive fire in Colorado history by buildings lost. Ground Force’s founder happened to be in the area on business, saw the devastation firsthand, and the organization deployed within days — while already running Houma and Mayfield.

The work here was unlike any other deployment. Whole two-story houses had collapsed into their own basements and been reduced to ash. In freezing temperatures, teams put on Tyvek suits, gloves and masks, lowered themselves into those cavities and sifted the ash foot by foot with a homemade sieve, hunting for anything survivable. Volunteers also hauled smoke-ruined furniture to the curb for elderly residents and cut burned limbs threatening unburned homes.

A tornado tore through Arabi and the historic Lower Ninth Ward. Ground Force stood up SAFE Camp within days and ran a hot-meal and supply operation out of the Walmart lot, with ground teams walking every home in the impact zone rather than waiting for people to come to the line.

The figures below are drawn from the raw SAFE Camp daily log — opening and closing times, plate counts, cars through the line. They cover the SAFE Camp program only; Community Caretaking numbers for Arabi were never compiled.

Kentucky is the deepest and longest engagement in this record, and the one that changed how Ground Force thinks about recovery. SAFE Camp ran from 29 July to 16 August 2022. But the grant-funded Disaster Case Management and Construction Ground Crew programs that followed ran for more than two years, and they were staffed by local people who had themselves been flooded.

Close to thirty residents of the affected counties were hired — a requirement of the program was that you had to have lost your home or your job to the flood. A man whose house the construction crew repaired one day was hired onto that crew the next. The Disaster Case Management supervisor had lost her home, her job and all income in the flood; she was hired to help families in exactly her situation, and has since had her own home rebuilt.

Case managers worked 317 flood-survivor households, and the construction crew averaged three to five home repairs a week.

The largest single response in the organization’s history. Ground Force ran two simultaneous SAFE Camps — North Fort Myers and South Fort Myers — and in eighteen days moved twelve million dollars of in-kind goods through drive-up carlines while serving eighty thousand hot meals. Boat crews carried out thirty rescues and delivered critical supplies in the immediate aftermath.

This is the deployment that proved the thesis: social reach converts to physical goods. In-kind donations poured in from across the United States because people watched it happening live, and Ground Force put those goods directly into the hands of people who needed them.

When the carlines wound down, Ground Force embedded in a small, largely migrant and elderly community on the barrier island where Ian made landfall. Entire homes, businesses and agricultural lands were gone. People were living in their vehicles; some had lost the vehicles too.

The team ran a medical tent functioning as a M.A.S.H. unit, with volunteer physicians, RNs and social workers rotating around the clock providing wound care and triage to islanders and relief workers alike — the island was so contaminated after the storm that a simple scratch could be fatal. Boots-on-the-ground teams mucked, gutted and tarped the homes of the elderly, disabled and veterans at no charge.

The deployment ended because the money ran out, not because the work did.

An EF4 three-quarters of a mile wide cut a sixty-mile path through the Mississippi Delta, taking out Rolling Fork’s police department, city hall, water system and hospital. Ground Force was the first nonprofit on the scene and the last to leave. The response drew national attention: an invitation to meet President Biden, and featured coverage across multiple Good Morning America broadcasts with a QR-code fundraising campaign.

Two AmeriCorps NCCC teams worked under Ground Force supervision for six weeks, clearing 36,900 pounds of debris between them. Volunteers also cleaned the town cemetery and restored a local park — work nobody was going to fund, that a community needs to feel like itself again.

Ground Force was on the ground in Lahaina seventy-two hours after the fire, four and a half thousand miles from home. The approach here is the clearest demonstration of what “fluid” means in practice: rather than build a parallel operation, the team scaled up what locals had already started. A distribution site running 300 cars in its first two days was running over 1,200 the day after Ground Force arrived, using the SAFE Camp model and the Bigs to Bags method — and the team taught local organizers how to track volunteers and hours for FEMA reimbursement, money that stays in the community long after we go.

Ground Force also supplied its own Starlink to restore internet at Lahaina Gateway Shopping Center and brought in ITDRC for broader coverage. Survivors sitting in carlines connected with family for the first time in days.

The team advised Hawaii State Rep. Elle Cochran, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, and the nonprofit Na Mea Ike Ia – Hawaiian Royal Guard on disaster recovery and emergency management navigation, and helped launch Uplift Lahaina, a community-led healing and resource center. Volunteers also drove survivors to FEMA and HUD centers and walked them through registration. At one point they threw a birthday party for a five-year-old survivor.

Feeding began on day one — hot meals went out within hours of SAFE Camp going up. Fourteen thousand hot meals followed in nine days. But Idalia’s defining detail is what the medical and mental-health team found in the rural county: elderly residents and shut-ins who had been twelve days with no running water and no electricity, in extreme heat, with no food. Nurses went into those homes. They are still following up on some of those survivors.

Volunteers also supplied 52 residents at a local assisted living facility, a pregnancy center and an elementary school, and delivered pallets of animal food and cleaning supplies to the sheriff’s department, the Humane Society and Windhorse Sanctuary. Ground Force managed two AmeriCorps NCCC teams through the long tail of debris removal, and received a civic award from the local Chamber of Commerce.

The clearest single proof of the leverage ratio in this entire record. Ground Force raised three thousand dollars for Panama City — two donors, one gave $1,000 and one gave $2,000 — and spent every cent of it. SAFE Camp ran anyway.

What that three thousand dollars produced: $28,000 in donated goods received and given away, 283 hours of volunteer time worth $8,490, twelve hotel room nights, everyone’s fuel and food, and a generator. Total delivered: $39,790 in in-kind goods and volunteer effort on $3,000 of funding — a 13× return.

A short, surgical deployment north of Houston, coordinated with the Cleveland Fire Department and pivoted in real time as the need moved. The team filled and staged water barrels, then ran targeted muck-outs — including a full flood tear-out for the Zapata family on County Road 3812, covered by FOX 26 Houston. The on-site lead was a corporate volunteer from Phoenix Technology Services.

Walmart.org offered a store parking lot; Ground Force took a better option. Rather than stand up an isolated site, the team partnered with the Brazoria County Dream Center, an existing food pantry with a ready volunteer corps, and ran SAFE Camp out of it for five days — feeding into infrastructure that would still be there after Ground Force left. Six hundred meals a day went out to the carline that formed there, with Operation BBQ Relief.

Immediately after Beryl, Ground Force joined a Footprint Project build at Schneider Electric in Houston to mount solar micro-grids on its response trailers. The organization now deploys with clean power available on day one.

Ground Force re-established SAFE Camp in Houma the day after landfall — the same site used during Hurricane Ida three years earlier. That mattered: survivors already knew where to go and who would be standing there. Familiarity is infrastructure.

Governor Jeff Landry and First Lady Sharon Landry visited SAFE Camp, alongside partners from the American Red Cross and The Salvation Army.

A two-phase response across two states. Phase one put SAFE Camp into Perry, Florida for rapid relief, running high-capacity drive-thru distribution and serving 2,500+ hot meals in three days with Walmart’s Disaster Relief Kitchen.

Phase two moved into the cut-off rural mountain counties of Western North Carolina, where the need was medical and the clock was weather. Volunteer nurses treated 125 patients at SAFE Camp. The team distributed insulin, EpiPens and oxygen. And in a race against the first freeze, Ground Force supplied 1,344 propane tanks with AmeriGas to households with no other heat.

Helene is also where our remote coordination proved out at scale: with communication lines down across the mountain counties, we pushed real-time aid maps and updates to more than fifty thousand residents.

Flash floods swept the Texas Hill Country on the Fourth of July. Ground Force was on the ground within hours, and the work was defined by proximity to an active search-and-rescue operation: teams cleared massive debris piles from seven properties in dangerous conditions so that recovery crews could keep working.

The storytelling arm did what it is built to do. Rob Gaudet was on CNN’s The Situation Room four days after the flood, and ninety-five volunteers signed up in three weeks. The team also did the quiet work that never makes a metric — returning photographs and keepsakes to families who had lost everything else.

The organization’s first international deployment, and its first move from relief into permanent rebuilding. Ground Force went into the hardest-hit rural mountain communities above Montego Bay — places where, fifteen days after the storm, help was only just arriving. Families were drinking from contaminated rivers and sleeping under twisted debris.

SAFE Camp was established, then leadership was transitioned to a Jamaican Director of Ground Operations — the model working the way it should, with local ownership rather than an indefinite foreign presence. Alongside relief, the team launched the Soma Nook resilient housing project: efficiently built board homes designed to replace vulnerable wooden structures, built with local labor and local contractors. Ten homes were commissioned against a Phase One goal of thirty.