Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, said Monday that the “faith-based community” will play a large role in helping those displaced by the carnage of Tropical Storm Harvey.
“The faith-based community here is going to have a very, very big role in this going forward when it comes to housing, putting people up,” Perry said on “Fox and Friends.” “We’re watching a very, very thoughtful, well-orchestrated effort in the face of a massive, massive storm that Mother Nature has thrown the state of Texas.”
Perry said the damage was going to reach historic proportions, and faith-based organizations would continue their roles in providing relief for years to come.
“The models that we’ve had historically, you can throw them out the window. This is going to be a really, really long recovery. It’s going to take a long time for people to be brought back to any semblance of normalcy in many areas of the state,” the energy secretary said. “So the faith-based community may play one of the most important roles in this, long term. And that’s what they’ve historically done.”
“This president, he will salute that,” Perry added. “He will help them, he will support the faith-based community going forward as one of the major resources to help these people.”
Perry also praised the efforts of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and said that communication between Texas and the federal government has been solid. However, regarding speculation over whether or not Houston officials should have ordered a mandatory evacuation, Perry warned against politicizing the storm too soon.
“I think spending any time trying to be critical at this particular point in time is a real disservice. We have people whose lives are in jeopardy here. You try to move 2.5 million people out, we did that in ’05 with one of the major storms that we had, there are challenges on both sides of this. Let’s focus on the search and rescue then we’ll get focused on the recovery,” he said.
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