Hurricane Milton made landfall on Wednesday night. Meanwhile, entire communities are still recovering from Hurricane Helene.
Two Kansas City companies are helping victims of the hurricanes.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with everybody,” Nathan Clausen said.
Clausen is the vice president of Solar & Roofing Solutions at JR & Co., a construction company headquartered in Kansas City. The company already has a branch in Fort Meyers.
He said they opened that branch after they’d helped with Hurricane Irma.
"We're going to send an additional about 60-70 people,” he said. “So we'll double our capacity to get on the roofs, assess damage, help people with their, you know, roofs that may be blown off."
When the Kansas City crew gets there, they're getting right to work.
"We're going to do a temporary repair as best we can through various means. But we'll have a few cranes going, multiple guys, you know, 18 hours a day, at least for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Nick Smith is the founder of Sailes Inc. in Kansas City. He realized he could use his company’s AI products to help. So he reached out to their partner JR & Co., with an idea to expedite what they’re doing to help.
"In this case, the AI is doing all of that work hands-free, but also reaching out on their behalf and even reading, reacting and interacting with them based on their response,” Smith said.
Smith’s team built AI-programmed robots called Sailesbots that contact places in the most damaged ZIP codes in the Southeast. These connections allow JR & Co. to help with rebuilding.
Smith said the amount of outreach they’ve done in days would have taken a year in person.
"The point of this was that I thought we could really help,” he said. "People can get the resources they need even quicker."
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