The biggest grocery store chains have been quick to reopen in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, a sign of just how vital the retailers are to disaster food relief.
“On Tuesday, at the height of the flooding, Walmart had closed 134 Houston-area stores. By Thursday, only 21 stores remained closed. H-E-B (a Texas-based grocery chain) also had reopened almost 90 percent of its stores by then. Of the 20 stores owned by Albertson’s, 16 are now open,” says NPR.
Some of the bigger grocery chains are actually better prepared for disaster planning than city governments, says Roni Neff, a professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Neff co-authored a report this year on ways Baltimore could safeguard food supplies during disasters like flooding.
At the time of her research, “there was an emergency operations center (in the city), but nobody [overseeing] food was there,” she says. Baltimore has since hired a “food resilience coordinator.”
In the case of Harvey, grocers in Houston are providing food relief on the ground, as well as in the store. The Houston Food Bank had 17 truckloads of non-perishable goods scheduled to arrive from Wal-Mart, for instance. At this point, some of the greatest demand for food is in rural areas hit by the storm, where roads are still inaccessible.