Hurricane Ian has made landfall as a Category 4 storm along the western coast of Florida, according to the National Hurricane Center. Our thoughts are with those impacted by the hurricane, and we’re already taking steps to support our employees, communities, and customers in the region.
Supporting our employees
Amazon has more than 8,000 employees in the Tampa area, and their safety is our top priority. We’re taking several actions to keep them protected:
- Our teams near the path of the storm are implementing safety plans, which ensure that our employees have time to prioritize their personal safety and seek shelter.
- We’ve closed more than 80 facilities in the path of the storm, including Whole Foods Market stores.
- We’re paying employees for scheduled shifts during the closures.
- We are providing immediate relief assistance to employees whose homes have been damaged by the storm, including temporary housing for them and their families and cash to cover food and transportation.
Supporting our communities
Our disaster relief team is ready to use Amazon’s logistics infrastructure and expertise to support the communities impacted by the storm. Over the past few days, we’ve worked with our partners on the ground to be ready to provide aid after the hurricane hits. Those efforts include prepositioning key relief products as close as possible to areas in the storm’s path, so we can quickly ship supplies to communities that need them the most.
Here are some of the steps we’ve taken so far to help:
- We activated Amazon’s Disaster Relief Hub, a special warehouse in Atlanta where the company prepositions over 1 million relief items that we know are the most needed when a disaster strikes.
- Amazon teams have loaded 10 trucks with over 360,000 bottles of water and strategically prepositioned the vehicles around Florida and in other southern U.S. states, so we can quickly deliver clean water to impacted communities.
- Amazon supplies continue to flow from our disaster relief hub and sites around the country in affected areas in Florida. We’re working to fulfill requests from our disaster relief partners like the American Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, Americares, and Save the Children for items such as food, rain gear, traffic cones, solar lights, diapers, medical supplies, and mold remover. Thousands of these items have already been delivered or are on the way.
- We have reserved a parking lot at one of our facilities in Jacksonville, Florida, to allow the Red Cross to park up to 75 trailers that will help transport relief items as soon as they’re needed.
- We’ve donated $1 million to the Florida Disaster Fund to help communities impacted by Hurricane Ian.
- We have activated a donations button on our site to make it easier for customers to support relief efforts.
- In response to Hurricane Ian, the AWS Disaster Response team has deployed volunteers and AWS technology alongside international relief organization Help.NGO. Starting in Cape Coral, Florida, AWS will help with a wide range of activities including establishing internet connectivity for community centers like firehouses to help first responders, relief organizations, and impacted individuals who are relying on these centers for support.
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Supporting our customers
We have closed several Amazon locations to keep employees and their families safe, and delivery routes have been affected by the storm damage, so we know customers in the same areas will be impacted.
Here’s what we’re doing to continue serving Amazon customers:
- We will use our fulfillment capacity outside the region impacted by the storm to support customer orders, especially facilities in the Southwest and Midwest.
- We are monitoring the hurricane’s forecast so we can precisely estimate what areas will be impacted by the storm and quickly deliver essential products to those communities.
- For customers in impacted areas, we are extending our delivery promise because our teams will not be able to deliver in certain zip codes until it’s safe to do so.
- We are monitoring our online stores 24 hours a day, both automatically and manually, to combat price gouging, including of essential items that might be in high-demand during the storm. We quickly remove bad actors and offers that don’t meet our long-standing policy of zero tolerance for price gouging in our stores.
We will continue to keep track of Hurricane Ian, mobilize our teams, and repurpose our logistics infrastructure to support our employees, customers, and the communities we call home.
