HOUSTON – As the rains from Hurricane Harvey fell, causing the Houston area to flood, Matthew Marchetti hopped in a boat and began rescuing elderly members of his church.
Pretty soon, he realized there was an overwhelming number of people who still needed to be rescued, but there were not enough resources to get to them. He and his friend Nate created what he called a “simple website” which would allow him to match people who need to be rescued with those who had the ability to rescue them.
“Sounds great right? We put 20 people into the que (to be rescued), woke up the next morning and there was 1,500 (waiting to be rescued). We freaked out because we only had two boats,” said Marchetti.
Community steps up to help
“Luckily for us, what started happening was regular people started signing up saying, ‘I have kayak, I have a John boat, I have a bay boat’ and they just started pulling up the map in their neighborhood and going and rescuing people. Helping rescue about 25,000, surprising most of all us,” said Marchetti.
CrowdSource Rescue was born
After the success of the rescue efforts during Harvey, Marchetti and his friend changed the name of the website from Houston Harvey Rescue to CrowdSource Rescue.
CrowdSource Rescue by the numbers
14 Incidents (since 2017)
1,980 Certified First Responders
18,513 Rescuers and Volunteers
46,136 Survivors Helped