WEBSTER, Texas — Gene Crider looked around and saw a park nearby with a track and a playground. The ground there and in the surrounding neighborhood looked level.
“You would wonder how that flooded,” he said.
But when Hurricane Harvey struck in late August, it dumped more than 50 inches of rain on the area in 12 hours. The city is west of Clear Lake, which opens into Trinity Bay, then Galveston Bay and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
Six months later, the cleanup continues. Volunteers from two local churches were among that traveled south in March to help homeowners as they continue to rebuild after hurricanes.
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Trinity Park United Methodist Church sent three of the 14 members of a team drawn from four United Methodist churches in Indiana. The team helped an minister’s widow outside Houston draw closer to returning to her home.
Tim Howell, another Trinity Park member, traveled to Florida with a different group to help as residents there clean up from September’s Hurricane Irma. Amity United Methodist Church volunteers also joined that larger group out of Hagerstown First United Methodist Church, traveling to Sebring to help a father and his three pre-teen and teen daughters.
Teams work with the United Methodist Committee on Relief, which helps match teams with projects. According to the group’s website, it awarded $1 million grants to the denomination’s Texas and Florida conferences to help with recovery. The denomination also had previously received $15 million from donors responding to U.S. disasters.
Months after a natural disaster destroys homes, many residents continue to stay with family members or in FEMA trailers plopped at the residence. For those un- or underinsured, rebuilding time is squeezed in during evenings or on weekends around a full-time day job.
“It’s just a hard, hard place to be when you’re not in the place you call home,” said the Rev. Larry Van Camp.
Work teams help homeowners speed toward the day they can move back in. According to need in the area and expertise on a team, volunteers may work at several homes during their trip or remain at a single site all week.
For Van Camp, senior pastor at Trinity Park, the March 17 to 24 trip was the latest in a string of work trips over the years, from Pascagoula, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina to Henryville, Indiana, after a tornado.
“As Christians, we’re called to serve in the name of Christ,” he said. “That could be us. … All of us are dependent on one another more than we realize.”
The team stayed at a church in Lake Jackson, south of Houston, sleeping on air mattresses and sleeping bags and rising early each day for breakfast, devotions and the hour’s drive to the work site. In the evenings, the volunteers braved rush-hour traffic to return to Lake Jackson, grab clean clothes and towels for showers at the local YMCA and have dinner and devotions at the church before going to sleep.
In addition to Van Camp and Trinity Park members Gene Crider and Carol Grace, the group included several youths on spring break from Seymour First United Methodist Church. Van Camp’s daughter, Rachel Nay, is director of youth and young adults there.
The house where the teens and adults worked gathered 8 inches of water inside during the hurricane. That much water, coupled with the time that remained before waters receded and homeowners could return, was a recipe for mold.
“Those kinds of stories are just heard over and over again,” Van Camp said. “You virtually lose everything in your house. Anything contaminated by water has to be thrown out.”
Drywall had to be torn out and replaced. Debris was gathered in the front yard until a dumpster would arrive. Crider removed tile in the bathroom and helped fashion a wider bathroom doorway for the minister’s widow, who owns the home and uses a wheelchair. He also removed tile in the shower, where standing water had rotted the wood behind it.
“I only had four Band-Aids by the second day, so that was pretty good,” he joked.
A week earlier in Florida, Howell pulled roofs off homes on 85-degree days with no shade or wind. Like Van Camp and Crider, he’s a veteran of work trips. He’s found them eye-opening, and for those who go, he said, “It just reinforces the fact that they’ve got it made, and they don’t know it, probably.”
The Rev. Ford Bond of Amity United Methodist Church was also with that Florida group, working at a home built nearly 3 feet off the ground that nevertheless held several feet of water inside during Hurricane Irma. Now, its walls are stripped down to the wooden studs.
The father at the house, a farm hand, was busy rounding up cattle before the storm hit. Now, he lives in a FEMA trailer at the site while his three daughters stay with a grandmother, Bond said.
“All these people are great people. They just lack insurance and money to put it together,” Bond said.
“The person in charge told us they’re looking at three to five more years (for the area).”
The volunteers at the home worked to repair the floor, redo a door, install a new standup shower and other tasks. Amity paid for new bathroom fixtures, hoping the money saved on a vanity, toilet and fixtures will free up funds in the overall budget for a new window here or something extra at the next house.
The group started on plumbing but ran out of time, Bond said. The next work team will carry the project forward.
Bond said the work trip teams and those who send them can learn from the experience. They might never meet those helped or even know if they’re grateful, but he said that’s not important.
“We want to expose our congregation to the needs of other places to show them we’re connected,” he said. “… Our purpose is to show Christ and help those that need help.”
