Lavonia Woman in New Orleans with Salvation Army Disaster Team

By MJ Kneiser, WLHR

Lavonia resident Rebecca Dixon is on the ground in New Orleans with a Salvation Army disaster relief team helping the thousands there impacted by Hurricane Ida.

Dixon is the Toccoa Center Service Director for the Toccoa/Cornelia Chapter of the Salvation Army in Toccoa.

She was deployed Tuesday to New Orleans with The Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services and will be working with a Rapid Response Unit from Newnan, GA.

Dixon said she, along with other Salvation Army members will be set up by this afternoon to serve meals/snacks and offer pastoral care to survivors, workers, and responders.

“We will be set up in a neighborhood we’re assigned to and will be serving food, and providing whatever aid and pastoral care we can,” she told WLHR News Tuesday. “That’s what we do.”

Dixon said her team is part of a five-vehicle caravan that spent the night in Alabama and headed out early this morning to New Orleans.

Once there, they’ll be part of 10 other Salvation Army disaster teams from Georgia that will be joined by other Salvation Army teams from around the country.

“We will also be working alongside other Christian ministries and relief organizations,” she said.

A category 4 hurricane, when it came ashore in Louisiana, Ida left a path of destruction across the southeastern part of the state, flooding homes, killing at least one person, and leaving up to a million homes and businesses without power in metro New Orleans.

New Orleans Mayor Greg Cromer told CNN Monday that rescuers have been working to get people to safety who have been left stranded on the rooftops of their homes that had flooded.

He said cellphone service and phone service, in general, is sporadic and many people are left having to fend for themselves.

One rescuer said they think hundreds were left trapped in their homes and they’re working to find them and get them out.

Dixon said she expects to be deployed for up to two weeks and she asks for prayers as she and the other teams help those affected by Ida.