Right on 'Que

By David W. Brown

Since Hurricane Ida ravaged remote Louisiana towns and communities, a disaster recovery group called ResQue has worked tirelessly to feed community members and utility workers in devastated, poorly populated areas.

“I think that the heart and soul of this country is in our smaller communities,” said Brad Gottsegen, who founded ResQue in 2016. “Those communities are the easiest to forget about, particularly after a storm. It’s like they fall off the radar. There’s not much in the way of industry and business going on in a lot of these communities, and so people forget that they exist.” But the people, he said, are still there, and their struggles are real.

The group goes into these communities with trailers, grills, tables, chairs, and tents to set up food distribution sites. They not only feed people but also strike up conversations with them and help them open up. They are, in other words, doing more than feeding people — they are helping build communities.

Gottsegen first organized the program after seeing the severe flooding that devastated Baton Rouge and neighboring Livingston Parish. As a member of a pediatric cancer fundraising group called Hogs for the Cause for more than a decade, he knew he could leverage his connections to help those in need long before other relief organizations could mobilize a response.

“I had a whole group of friends who have the knowledge and capacity to cook large amounts of food,” he said. “I made a couple of calls, and not surprisingly, within a matter of an hour had forty volunteers who pledged to provide food, cook food, and serve food in Baton Rouge.”

They fed five thousand people during a single weekend, including flood victims, contract workers, military service members, and first responders. “Anyone who was hungry and looking for a hot meal,” he said. “It was just a really powerful communitybuilding event.”

After those successful two days, Gottsegen sat down with fellow volunteers, and they discussed the situation and the future. It was something he thought they should do regularly, he said, as the need for disaster relief is only increasing in South Louisiana and across the Gulf Coast. Storms, he said, are more common and more violent than in years gone by. “We decided that we have the capacity, we have the desire, and we know how to fundraise, so let’s put something together that will allow us to do this whenever the need arises.”

That was the genesis of ResQue. Gottsegen and his group subsequently formed a 501c3 nonprofit with the stated mission of preparing hot meals for those in need and covering the time gap between a disaster event and the federal and state response.

Needs were a little different post-Ida, however.

“What’s particularly interesting about this storm,” Gottsegen said, “is that the disaster response has gotten much better and much more diverse.” Between the Red Cross, the National Guard, and World Central Kitchen, tremendous resources were brought to bear in a timely manner. But in the aftermath of the storm comes the aftermath of the response, wherein another problem emerges: at some point, these organizations leave, regardless of the state of hurting communities.

“If you’ve driven around South Louisiana in the last couple of weeks, you’ve seen that this recovery is going to take years. The devastation in some of these areas is almost incomprehensible. These organizations come in and do an incredible job in the near term, but in the long term, they just disappear, even though people in disaster-stricken areas are really hurting, really needing assistance, really looking for an uplifting hot meal and a cold beverage.”

ResQue has thus stepped in to fill that space, focusing its efforts on the relief of small communities still recovering from the hurricane.

“We started working two weeks after the storm. We’ve been focusing on much smaller communities that have not received the attention that larger places like Houma and the New Orleans area have gotten,” said Gottsegen.

ResQue has been able to feed communities and utility employees who have been working diligently to restore an entire power grid wiped off the map. “The resilience of the people that we have been able to serve has been extraordinary and uplifting,” he said.

Though he’s been doing this for several years, what strikes Gottsegen most profoundly post-Ida are the seemingly limitless capacity for kindness and generosity within these communities and the pride Louisianans take in their homes and heritage.

“Something like this comes about, and the number of people that have just thrown themselves into the mix with what we do — the number of people who have offered their time or their money or anything they can do to help us — has just absolutely been beyond anything that I have experienced in the six years that we’ve been doing this. It gives me hope for the future,” he said. Anyone interested in helping ResQue in its mission can contact them at resqueorg@gmail.com to find out how to volunteer or donate.

ResQue has worked closely with Rouses Markets because of the number of stores Rouses has in many of these far-flung and affected areas.

“Most of these areas had severe damage and literally no goods and services available,” he said. “Not only no electricity, no gas stations, no drugstores. In some places, every building was damaged.” The lack of electricity has made life particularly harrowing for some communities that were impoverished to begin with. The loss of homes and lack of basic human needs has made life for many just shy of unbearable. “We drove through entire swaths of communities where every power pole was down, every wire was in the street.”

Already, ResQue has served almost 10 thousand meals in five communities, and they aren’t close to stopping.

“We’ll continue to serve roughly 15 hundred meals per event as long as the need is there,” said Gottsegen. “A hot meal and a cold beverage can make people realize that we haven’t forgotten about them. We’re there to support them. They have not been forgotten.”

ResQue team from left to right: Rob Laurent, Drew Herrington, Dave McCelvey, Brad Gottsegen, Robby Moss.

Photo by Channing Candies.