Roger Fingas
People shopping on Apple's Canadian iTunes storefront can now donate to relief for victims of the forest fires in Fort McMurray, Alberta, which have burned for several days and forced the evacuation of over 100,000 people, destroying 20 percent of the homes in the area.
The company is accepting donations to the Canadian Red Cross in standard $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 increments. As is also usual for iTunes donations, Apple is promising to hand over all of the money it receives without taking a cut.
Forests around Fort McMurray — the heart of the Canadian oil sands industry — have been on fire since the beginning of the month, in one of the largest such disasters in the country's recorded history. The affected area covers some 620 square miles, which would be enough to engulf most of the area in and around New York City.
On Apple's American iTunes storefront, the company is still concentrating on donations for recent earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador.
Apple is treating those as a combined incident, with donations going to the American Red Cross, the company's default charity for disasters. Both earthquakes were lethal, the Ecuador quake alone killing at least 660 people.
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Americans interested in donating to the Canadian Red Cross can simply visit the Canadian Red Cross's website, specifically here: https://donate.redcross.ca/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1951&ea.campaign.id=50610&_ga=1.200075054.1882697387.1462809930
Good time lapse map halfway down this linked page:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/the-fort-mcmurray-disaster-read-the-latest/article29930041/
Another place to donate is the Edmonton Emergency Relief Services. You can donate here:
http://www.eerss.org/support-us-eerss
Now this is the kind of "social responsibility" that corporations can put their shoulder to and get a good grade from everybody.
Well, except those folks who don't like the Red Cross...
I'll never again donate to the Red Cross, for ANYTHING!
The American Red Cross (ARC) collected hundreds of millions of dollars for Haiti after the earthquake there, then did NOTHING for Haiti with the money. And ARC management have repeatedly, REPEATEDLY refused to account for the donated money to the U.S. Congress. American Red Cross management is nothing but crooks and thieves.