Hurricane Katrina Victim Relief

The devastation and loss of life from Hurricane Katrina is beyond comprehension. The people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are in for a long tough haul and our hearts go out to all those that have had their life forever altered.

The aftermath of Katrina is not a week-long event and then back to business as usual. It will be a major, long-term rebuilding effort requiring the support of the entire country. We are confident Americans will come together to help their fellow citizens desperately in need of emotional, physical and financial support.

To do our small part we went to the American Red Cross site to give a donation. The good news, the site was experiencing heavy traffic; the bad news, we couldn’t get onto the site. No problem we thought, we’ll make our donation through Amazon .com.

We remembered Amazon collected money for the Red Cross relief effort for the tsunami victims earlier this year and so we clicked on over to Amazon. Surprisingly we couldn’t find a link or a page on the Amazon site for the Katrina hurricane victims. This struck us as rather odd, especially because the tech savvy folks at Amazon must realize the Red Cross site is being swamped and a little help in collecting donations would be important at the stage of the relief effort.

Apparently the giant online retailer can’t be bothered as Amazon has no plans to help collect donations.

An Amazon spokesperson said that the online retailer had no plans to post a donation link on its site. "Each case is different," she said. "The Red Cross has essentially given over its entire site to donations. The tsunami came out of the blue, so it was an 'all hands on deck' situation, but the Red Cross has been getting ready for this and getting its message out there for several days."

Does this explanation make sense to you? What does the Red Cross getting their message out before the hurricane have to do with helping to collect donations after the disaster, especially now that we know the scope of the devastation? From all we’ve read, Katrina is the worse disaster in the history of the country.

As far as we are concerned, Amazon has shown its true colors and they aren’t red, white and blue. If Americans in desperate need don’t rate a bit of Amazon’s tech resources, than Amazon doesn’t rate our future business. In the mean time we’ll keep trying the overloaded Red Cross site.

Update: Amazon.com has added a hurricane relief link for American Red Cross donations to their main page. We are very pleased Amazon has reversed their earlier position and has agreed to help out.