Flood Service

After the floods there was TONS of opportunities to do service.  For over a month Ben spent every weekend and free evening helping people clean up. I was also able to help a little bit.  Here are some of the things we saw, experiences we had and thoughts we have from this hard time.

The week after the flood I went to Longmont with my friend Tanaya to help some flood victims clean up (Mom watched our kids- she's awesome).  We went to a neighborhood near Mom's house to help; they had been allowed back into their homes (after the evacuation) the night before.  There were two guards from the National Guard at the entrance of the neighborhood making sure no one drove their cars in (we had to park a block or two away and walk) and to stop any looters. We walked in, went to the first house we came to and asked if they needed help.  The people we shocked that we would just come to help but quickly put us to work scraping dry mud out of their laundry room/bathroom.  The water had only come in about a foot in the first/garage level floor and was already dry.  They were emptying rooms and things to the curb but were in pretty good shape.  After about two hours we left to check on the kids.  

This is the neighborhood Tanaya and I went to only a few days before we were there. 

 When we came back we walked a little deeper into the neighborhood to where the flooding was worse, it looked like a war zone and was so shocking to see.  We stopped to help a family with young teenage girls who still had a foot of water in their basement.  They were using a pump to get the water out (but like so many other people in the neighborhood the water had nowhere to go and was just coming back in).  Here we did a lot more manual work; ripped out floodboards, ripped out drywall and carpeting. We also climbed into their crawl space and helped remove their storage (everything was ruined and it was heart breaking) and all the insulation (wet insulation is super heavy).  They were putting piles of ruined wet stuff in front of their drive way and the city had dump trucks and tractors coming to pick it all up and take it away.   It was so wonderful to go and spend a couple hours helping those people and to see the terrible damage and know how blessed and fortunate we were. 

Later that week we went back to Longmont with a bunch of our friends and I stayed at Mom's house to babysit (5 toddlers- yikes) while everyone went out; they went to a neighborhood and power washed mud out of a man's basement.  I also had an opportunity that week (thanks again to Mom for watching Elizabeth) to go to the Longmont Crisis Center and do some data entry.  I was putting into the computer (for the red cross and other organizations) the information of all the people evacuated.  It was sad and shocking to see how many people were effected and to read the huge amount of damage done. 

About two weeks after the flooding our ward got out of church early and went up Boulder Canyon to help at a man's house.  His property was destroyed and his house was unlivable.  The river had created a new path straight through his yard; destroying his driveway, septic system and leaving huge rocks and debris everywhere.  This man had had no relief or help because his house was so deep down a destroyed road that no one thought there was anyone back there.  He got the number of the church and called for help and had hundreds of volunteers out to his house and neighborhood.  The Saturday before our ward went Ben went up with the church and helped to dig someone's car out; the cars were buried so high you could only see the very top.  It was shocking to see the amount of damage and to realize that it had all happened from the power of water. It was also amazing to see how quickly the church responded and sent people to help.   The following pictures are from this man's house and neighborhood.

Yay for the Louisville Ward! (I am not in this picture- this is only about half of the people that went to help)