MINNEAPOLIS — Blood collection agencies are issuing an urgent appeal for blood donations as Hurricane Milton inches closer to Florida.
Milton is expected to make landfall sometime Wednesday night. It comes as parts of Florida deal with devastation already caused by Hurricane Helene less than 2 weeks ago. Areas of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee are also recovering from that deadly hurricane.
According to both the American Red Cross and Memorial Blood Centers, the back-to-back storms are causing blood donation centers to close and blood drive events to be canceled in the impacted areas. They say the disruptions are expected to persist for months, exacerbating the nation's existing blood supply challenges.
"We've had to cancel hundreds of blood drives across the country because of the storms and because of that, we look to places that haven't been impacted by the hurricanes to step up and contribute more," said Dave Schoeneck, external relations person for the American Red Cross in the Minnesota and Dakotas region.
"We then will move those blood products to where they're really needed, so it's a constant movement of material from places that have more to places that don't have any."
Several people stopped by the Minneapolis Red Cross Blood and Platelet Donation Center and Memorial Blood Centers' Minneapolis Donor Center on Wednesday. Both are located downtown.
The actual time it takes to donate blood is typically 10–20 minutes, but the entire process can take 30–60 minutes.
"I donate because I know that there's pretty much always a need somewhere in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, in the United States," said Carolyn Roby, who donates to Memorial Blood Centers four times a year and has done so for around 15 years now. "It's easy to do, it doesn't hurt and it feels important."
"The fact is that only about 3% of the population donates blood, so we need to encourage people to change that number and, like Carolyn, get people to come back in more than once a year," MBC community relations manager Phil Losacker added.
Donation locations and blood drive dates are frequently updated on the American Red Cross and Memorial Blood Centers' websites.