CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Salvation Army volunteers from Clearwater and St. Petersburg prayed for safety Tuesday before heading to help with Hurricane Florence relief efforts.

Teams loaded up supplies and equipment at the Tampa warehouse. The organization is deploying volunteers along with mobile disaster and feeding units.

"We're prepared with our canteen to serve 1,500 meals right off of the truck, so we can cook on there and they'll deploy us to wherever the need is the greatest," said Clearwater volunteer Joanne Hanton.

"Be it power outages or it could be the first responders. We really don't know until we get there and they give us our instructions," Hanton said.

Volunteers will also help provide clean-up kits and emotional support. They'll be deployed 14 days.

Crews from local energy companies are also being deployed.

About 250 TECO linemen and contractors are on their way, prepared for any scenario.

"Who knows what we're going to find up there," said Roger Miller, TECO line supervisor.

"Seen some weird things in some of these storms, but yeah, all depends on what we find up there, the main thing is for these guys to be safe up there," Miller said.

Duke Energy is sending more than 1,100 people from Florida and about 1,000 from the Midwest.

"It includes contractors, it includes native employees and our line personnel department, vegetation management as well as our damage assessment group," said Peveeta Persaud, spokesperson for Duke Energy.

"So, the crews that we'll be sending will be able to assist from the beginning of restoration as soon as it's safe to begin damage assessments and restoration."