Imperial County residents make journey to help with Hurricane Harvey recovery

A group of people in Imperial Valley are gathering donations for people in need due to the flooding in Texas.

At first the goal was to send 200 cases of water, but that goal has grown to so much more.

News 11 spoke to the group who started it all before they took off on their journey to help.

“I was looking through all the media stuff and everything, no one was doing anything, so on Monday morning I woke and I said you know what I’m not doing anything this week either, I would like to try to get 200 cases of water to Texas,” said Abbie Solarez, Brawley resident.

And the number kept on growing from there.

“On Tuesday Cody Preece called me and said if I was serious about doing this donation to Texas, I said yeah I would,” added Solarez.

With the help of social media and one post share after another, an overwhelming amount of donations started pouring in.

“People are losing everything, their home, I can’t even imagine. It makes me want to cry thinking about it,” said Candy Luna, Brawley resident.

Solarez and his team of friends established seven donation locations throughout Imperial County, including the humane society, and their main location in Brawley, Desert RV Service.

“Some people just came in and dropped off one bag of clothes, which to us it’s huge because now we got a room full of children’s clothes, baby wipes, diapers, waters, i think all together we collect about nine pallets of water, which is a lot of water we weren’t expecting,” said Joel Gonzalez, Manager at Desert RV Service.

“We have two trailers going now, that is good, thank you imperial valley for doing what we are doing,” said Solarez.

But the team is still in need of help.

“And now the biggest thing is to help collect a little bit of money to get Abbie and Cody down to Texas. It’s going to cost them we figured about $1500 bucks in fuel give or take, over and back. And the way it looks right now, they are going to make a second trip,” added Gonzalez.

“There is no colors today, there’s no race, just all American people. That’s all it is, help each other out,” said Solarez.

Once the team arrives in Texas they will meet with Firefighters in Harris County who will assist in distributing the donations.

The American Red Cross of Imperial Valley will also be holding training sessions this weekend for anyone interested in deploying to assist with Hurricane Harvey recovery.

You can find more information by visiting, http://www.redcross.org/local/california/san-diego.