On Sunday afternoon, deadly tornadoes ripped through east Alabama, as well as parts of Georgia and Florida.  The path of destruction from the EF-4, with 170 mile an hour winds, was at least 24 miles long, said Chris Darden, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Birmingham office.

Once again, Coca-Cola UNITED’s footprint was in the path of a natural disaster traveling through communities where our people live, work, and serve. The tornadoes path included two of our local bottler territories, Columbus Coca-Cola and West Point Coca-Cola.  Our Human Resources and local teams activated efforts immediately to make sure our people were safe and to assist these communities.

The destruction and death toll in Lee County, Alabama, are overwhelming, and we are so grateful and very blessed that all our people and their families were reported safe and had not experienced injury. However, we do have those that have suffered varying amounts of damage to their homes and/or vehicles. Our Human Resources team is working with them to provide support as needed.  We’re grateful for our Employee Relief Fund and to those of you who generously donated in the past; these funds are always so appreciated by our people who are in need.

Teams of our people went out to meet customer and community requests for Dasani™ water and donated meals to first responders and emergency personnel in Lee County.

As always, we look out for each other, keep each other informed, and we stick together. Not only do we stick together as a company, but as a Coca-Cola system as you can see from the recent Instagram post by Jim Dinkins, President, Coca-Cola North America

John Sherman, our President & CEO, sent out an update to everyone in our company to let us know our people were safe and how we can help one another during this time.

John added, “If you would like to make a donation to the American Red Cross in Alabama to help the families in our communities, go to>  http://www.redcross.org/Alabama.  Please continue to keep our people, their families and all those communities impacted by the tornadoes in your prayers. Thank you for all you do to support one another, our customers, and our communities.  Together we are better. Together, we are UNITED.”