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James Harden, DeAndre Jordan Committed to Texas Relief

DeAndre Jordan is a native of Houston, who stayed in-state to play his college basketball at Texas A&M. James Harden said he still calls Houston home after eight-plus seasons playing for the Rockets before his trade to Brooklyn in January.

Over the past week, the entire state of Texas has been battered by temperatures that reached lows not seen for decades, leading to a collapse of the state’s power grid that left millions without heat and electricity.

“Just for people's lives to be a little bit easier any way that James and I can help we've been doing things behind the scenes as much as possible,” said Jordan. “You know just getting resources to a lot of the people out there whether we're there or not, just being able to help a human being out during a time like this is something we both value.”

The utility outages have left people without water as pipes burst. Many areas were under boil-water orders for the water they could access in order to avoid contamination. Supermarket shelves were emptied, leaving necessities unavailable.

Among his efforts, Harden donated 3,000 meals from the restaurant he has been preparing to open in Houston.

“I have phone calls literally every day, all day trying to impact the city because they've shown me so much love and respect in the time that I was there,” said Harden. “So, I've called Houston home. It's devastating obviously. It's probably worse than the hurricane because we just don't know how many people were affected, not having electricity not having power and isn't able to eat or be outside or whatever the case may be. So, not only food — obviously, I have a restaurant in Houston that is not open yet — but not only food, we're trying to feed as many people as we can. A lot of water. You know, shoutout to Body Armour that is helping me with that. But, we have a lot of Body Armour shipping in this week for people which I will be posting.

“And as far as plumbing, I am in contact with some plumbing companies that have been for these last few days that have been taking care of 70 houses a day, you patching up these pipes because once the electricity came back on, pipes started to burst. We've seen so many cases of that in Houston. I've been in contact with the mayor, Mayor Turner. Just so many people that I've known that are able to help while I'm not there. And you know, obviously, this is a huge problem but I try to impact and help as much as I can while I'm out there. And I'll continue that. It won't stop because there's so many people that's been affected that I can't stop.”