Anheuser-Busch canned water

All sorts of public figures and companies have offered aid in various forms in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey’s landfall in Southeast Texas. Now two major breweries are joining the relief effort to provide safe, clean water to victims.

Anheuser-Busch said 50,000 cans were donated to a Red Cross facility in Baton Rouge. The brewery also plans to send another shipment of more than 100,000 cans to Arlington, Texas. MillerCoors, which is based in Chicago but has a brewery in Fort Worth, announced it will have 50,000 cans distributed to Red Cross outposts. MillerCoors also donated $25,000 to the Red Cross.

Anheuser-Busch has performed similar charitable acts before, donating water to victims of Hurricane Matthew last year and the Flint water crisis last January, among other catastrophic events. So they had already made preparations for Hurricane Harvey:

“Throughout the year, we periodically pause beer production at our Cartersville, Georgia brewery to produce emergency canned drinking water so we are ready to help out communities across the country in times of crisis,” Sarah Schilling, the brewmaster with Anheuser-Busch Cartersville Brewery, said in a statement.

“Putting our production and logistics strengths to work by providing safe, clean drinking water is the best way we can help in these situations,” Schilling said.

A spokesperson for Anheuser-Busch told HuffPost that these periodic pauses in their production are “built into the regular canning calendar” and that the water being donated this week was already canned and ready when the Red Cross issued a request for help.

Many athletes, particularly those with Texas connections, have donated and raised money toward the relief effort. Houston Texans star J.J. Watt donated $100,000 and raised nearly $1 million already through a crowdfunding campaign. Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott donated $21,000 to Salvation Army and implored his teammates to give money as well. NBA free agent Gerald Green, a Houston native, reached out to local boat-owners through Instagram in an effort to rescue victims who are stranded in their homes.

[Huffington Post]

About Jesse Kramer

Jesse is a writer and editor for The Comeback. He has also worked for SI.com and runs The Catch and Shoot, a college basketball website based in Chicago. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow Jesse on Twitter @Jesse_Kramer.