Johns Hopkins Responds Hurricane Katrina September 2005

Letter from President Brody to Students, Faculty and Staff

September 2, 2005

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:

Our televisions. Our radios. Our newspapers. The Internet. Everywhere we turn, there are stories of unspeakable human tragedy. In our own country. In the one place where we never would have expected something quite so terrible as this.

Because we are human, our first reaction is to ask: How can we help?

I want you to know that Johns Hopkins is helping. Already, a team of faculty from our three East Baltimore schools — Medicine, Nursing and Public Health — has left for Louisiana and Mississippi to conduct an assessment of emergency shelters for the American Red Cross.

Today, Dr. Gabor Kelen, director of our Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, put out a call for volunteers for a 100-person medical team to be prepared for mobilization by the federal government. Your response was immediate and overwhelming. Gabe tells me he is extremely proud of the Johns Hopkins community.

The schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering today announced plans to admit visiting undergraduate students from colleges and universities closed by Katrina. The Bloomberg School is doing the same for public health students displaced from Tulane University.

As this is just the beginning of the trial for Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, it is just the beginning of the Johns Hopkins response.

We will continue to collect all the information we can — about these initiatives and any others — and put it on our Johns Hopkins-wide Hurricane Katrina Response Web page at webapps.jhu.edu/jhuniverse/today/katrina.cfm. Johns Hopkins Medicine has also posted a Katrina page at www.hopkinsmedicine.org/katrina/index.html.

Information on these pages is updated frequently, so please check back often.

In the meantime, I urge that all of us continue to do what we can as individuals. For most of us, that means financial support for the relief efforts. There is a link our on Response page to information on donating to some of the leading relief agencies. [Sadly, it also has been necessary to post a warning against Internet charity "phishing" scams.]

And of course, there is another thing we should do: In any and every way that is appropriate to our individual beliefs, we should all keep our brothers and sisters along the Gulf Coast foremost in our minds and our hearts.

I thank you.

Sincerely,
Bill Brody