By Jesse Wright
Jesse.wright@panews.com
George Davis IV was not in Port Arthur when Hurricane Harvey touched down in South Texas.
Davis said he’d watched the weather closely and when he saw that the storm was expected to hit land, go back into the Gulf and head straight for Port Arthur, he took his family north, to Dallas.
“For Ike and Rita and even for Gustav, we went to Dallas. It’s almost a tradition. I don’t want to call it a tradition, but that’s what it is,” he said.

From the experiences, Davis said he knew to leave early.

“If they call an evacuation its gonna be the biggest mess going,” he said.

So, he left early and stayed safe.

But, hundreds of miles away, he kept an eye on his hometown on social media and when we saw, on Facebook and on Twitter, hundreds of people pleading for help, he knew he could do something.
“I tried my best to take advantage of social media because that’s something I know the majority of … our generation is constantly using,” he said.

Davis trawled through the Facebook feeds of anyone he could find, and if they needed help, he tried to arrange it.

An old neighbor of his got in contact with him asking if she could help. She was a dispatch operator in Houston and he put her to work reaching out to the Cajun Navy rescue boats, directing them to rescues while Davis stayed in contact with those needing help.

“Any message on a timeline, whether I knew them or not, I would get that information and send that to the dispatcher and she would send the Cajun navy,” he said.

After a while, a second Houston-based dispatch operator offered to help. Davis said this person was a complete stranger who wanted to do something to help Port Arthur and Davis enrolled this person, too.

As he coordinated help for hundreds of people, he thought of the irony.

“I was able to help others because I wasn’t in the flood. Had I stayed, I would have been one of the ones saying I need help,” he said.

Once he set to work, Davis said he spent the next two days hard at it—barely taking a break for sleep.

“For the first two nights it seemed like I was watching the sun come up,” he said. “I would set my alarm for an hour… it was like charging your cell phone, just get a quick hour and get back up there again.”

He said he was glad to do it.

“My nature is to help people, so like I said, that was the best case scenario because had I been here, it would have been me helping my family and then we would have been stuck at a shelter.”

As the waters receded, Davis kept up his work.

“I was sharing stuff even after the storm about where to get supplies,” he said. “I would spread information.”

Finally, after the roads cleared, Davis returned with his family. Their house, like so many others, had flooded.

“Like everyone else, we got water in, we took in a foot, and we lost everything on the ground, just like the next person,” he said.

He said his family stayed in a hotel for almost a month, and now he’s living in his sister’s apartment.
“There’s seven of us,” he said. “We thank God we have a roof over our head and our home gets fixed and we pray we get out of here as soon as possible.”

But through it all, Davis continues to volunteer. He said he’s organized several supply giveaways and he’s helping coordinate different groups of university students and others who want to come to Port Arthur to help.

“I also appreciated the groups reaching out like Miles College in Alabama that came down to help for two days,” he said.

Davis said he also thanked everyone on social media who helped spread the word about people who needed help and saved lives.

“I thank everyone because it was a whole bunch of friends on social media who started this little thing,” he said.