Continuing to support hurricane relief efforts
Update: In less than 24 hours, together we raised $2 million for Hurricane Irma relief and recovery. Thanks to your donations, we have met our goal. However, the crisis isn’t over. Your contributions can still provide critical relief to those in need. Although Google is no longer matching donations, please consider giving directly to these organizations.
Hurricane Irma has impacted communities throughout the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Hitting the Caribbean islands the hardest, Irma has left millions of people to rebuild in its wake.
Today, we’re kicking off a matching campaign to support relief and recovery efforts for this deadly storm, part of our overall $5 million hurricane relief effort this month.
Google.org will be matching up to $1 million in donations at https://www.google.org/irma-relief to support the Catholic Relief Service (CRS), UNICEF, and the American Red Cross (ARC).
Each of these organizations is providing critical relief and recovery resources to those in the affected regions:
- Catholic Relief Services is responding to the most remote places across the Caribbean, fulfilling essential needs such as food, water and shelter.
- UNICEF is on the ground supporting more than 2.8 million children, and their families, impacted across the Caribbean with emergency supplies and temporary education solutions.
- American Red Cross is the leading nonprofit responder in the Southeastern United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, working diligently to shelter, feed and support families impacted by the storm.
Crisis Response and SOS Alerts
Ensuring people have access to timely, official information in a time of crisis is crucial. To help, ahead of the storm, our Crisis Response team launched an SOS Alert in Search for the Caribbean, Florida and Georgia in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. Now, as people across the region return to their homes and search for information about Hurricane Irma, or related searches, they’ll see:
- Information on power outages
- Emergency information contacts
- Crisis maps in both English and Spanish, providing people with the local news, road closures, tweets, latest traffic and transit information, gas stations with crowdsourced fuel status, and post-Irma satellite and aerial imagery from partners NOAA and Digital Globe (e.g., Key West).
We hope these features will help people stay safe and informed—and we’ll continue to update with relevant resources in the coming days.
