Most of you probably heard in the news what happened in Cedar Rapids Iowa and many other Iowa communities back in June. Because of a very wet spring, there was record flooding in many areas. Cedar Rapids was particularly devastated losing more than four thousand homes to the floods.
The waters have receded and cleanup efforts are underway. It is a mammoth project!
Our church has been organizing large teams of volunteers to help with the work in Cedar Rapids. I had a chance to go with volunteers from our ward on Saturday. About 150 others were also there from the church all across Iowa working on about 28 different houses.
This is the group from my ward. We were assigned the home of an elderly man named John (the one not wearing the yellow "Mormon Helping Hands" t-shirt) . John said that he was only given two hours warning to evacuate his home before the water arrived. The flood filled the basement and main level to within a foot of the ceiling, completely destroying everything in the home. Nothing had been done in the home since the flood and our job was to remove and demolish everything, leaving only the frame of the house and the exterior siding.
The hardest part of the whole day was seeing and hearing the pain that John was feeling as his house was literally torn apart. He is a retired 23 year military veteran who just last fall suffered a stroke, leaving him partially disabled. Although he still was able to work with us on his home, he spent most of the time wandering around with a somewhat blank look on his face, moaning and crying, and sorting through his former treasures hoping to find anything that he could salvage. The end result was almost nothing. I was filled with grief as I witnessed the shear magnitude of his loss. It was heartbreaking.
The first part of the project was removing the furnishings from the main level and beginning the demolition of the walls. This is a picture of some of the teenage young men from our ward early in the project tearing plaster from the walls. They loved this part! How often do you get to take a crowbar and sledgehammer to a wall?
I fortunately did not have to help with the freezer full of rotten food and floodwater. I did however, find the washing machine still full of laundry along with that filthy brown two month stagnant river water and got my first soaking while helping to move it outside to dump.
I was the first one to venture into the basement and ended up spending most of the day down there. This is a picture of one section of the basement where a portion of the wall had collapsed creating a mudslide of cinder blocks, mud, and John's possessions. After seeing that, I began to question whether we should be in the house at all and wonder whether in the end the house will have to be bulldozed anyway.
When I first went down, it was impossible to even step from the stairs into the basement. It was completely dark. We had only two weak battery powered electric lanterns to work with. The flash photograph shows much more detail than we ever saw. I had no idea what it really looked like until I saw the pictures.
We organized a bucket brigade to begin making headway in the basement - passing up item after item until we had cleared enough space around the stairs to begin working. We found under the piles of debris a thick layer of very wet and slippery mud covering the whole floor.
Most of the day for me was spent carrying things out of the basement and scooping out bucketful after bucketful of that nasty mud. Any storage container that managed to remain upright was still completely filled with river water. I had many soakings trying to move those containers and ended the day completely wet and caked with mud.
As precarious as the situation was, miraculously no one was seriously injured. Rusty nails were everywhere, and sledgehammers and crowbars flying. At one point a huge section of ceiling came crashing down on two of our youth, but they shook it off, showing no signs of injury or slowing down. So far no one has developed any illness, though I'm sure there was disease everywhere in that home. We really felt that because of the service we were doing, that we were being watched over.
By the end of the day, we had cleared out a mammoth pile of debris. This is all of John's possessions and most of his home - all completely destroyed in a matter of hours. It was so sad.
Here's the finished product in the basement. Still a nice slippery layer of mud, but a big improvement over the start of the day.
Upstairs, most of the walls and a good portion of the ceilings were taken out by the end of the day. Everyone put in a very full very exhausting day.
I was very impressed with the youth that came with our group. They all worked hard all day long with very little rest or slowing down. We accomplished a lot of good for John and he and his family showed a tremendous amount of gratitude for the work we had done.
It was a very hard day - physically exhausting (I'm am SOOO sore today) and emotionally difficult. But in other ways, it was one of the most rewarding days I have had in a very long time.
I came home with a deeper sense of gratitude for what I have and a stronger realization that life is not about what we possess in our homes. Those things could be washed away in an instant leaving us with only the person that we are and the faith that we have and the relationships that we have built. Why do we spend so much time chasing the material things? "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal"
One house down ... Three thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to go. We expect to be going back often.
You can see all of our pictures here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/finchgregory/2008August30BettendorfWardCedarRapidsCleanup
