Putting houses in order: Greenfield team helps homeowner make fresh start after flood

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He sent his wife and three of the children over the bridge and away to higher ground, above the surging flood.

He stayed behind, up the hill from the house, but there was nothing he could do.

“He and his son sat there … and watched their home pretty much go down the creek,” said Sharon Feister.

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That was nearly two years ago, and the West Virginia family is still not able to move back home. But Feister and others in a team from Greenfield Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) recently traveled there, offering volunteer work to speed that day in coming.

When 8-10 inches of rain fell within a 12-hour span on June 23, 2016, it pushed the Elk River in West Virginia to a record high of 33.37 feet. The National Weather Service called the flash flood a once-in-a-thousand-years event. About two dozen people died. Thousands were displaced or without power as homes were flooded, and in some cases, uprooted and swept away.

After a flood recedes, there is much to be done. At another home in the area, the bottom half of the drywall has been cut off, an indicator of how high the waters rose inside the house. With the soaked materials stripped away, the walls await new drywall, sanding and painting.

Homeowners may not have flood insurance, or they may not have enough coverage to cover rebuilding. That doesn’t necessarily indicate lack of precautions; consider that the previous river level record was set in 1888. Also, the Rev. David Livingston, a retired minister who led the work team, notes that one house the team worked on had rested about 25 feet above the river before the flood.

“The thing that amazed me was the amount of water that had to be coming down the waterways,” Livingston said. “I was blown away by how much water had flooded that area.”

Livingston connected with the relief work through the Disciples Volunteering effort of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It communicates with the West Virginia office of VOAD, Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, which works to match those who want to help with the work needing done. Livingston said when applying, the team indicated what skills its members brought so VOAD could make a good match.

The Greenfield Christian team was sent to help two families. One house, the one with the bottom drywall cut out, needed new plumbing. The retired couple who owns the house has been renting as they wait to move back in.

David Limpus brought the know-how for that project, installing new plumbing after the old was removed amid fear of contamination.

“We did a lot of work in a short time and got to meet some good people,” Limpus said. He met the couple and described them as very nice, humble, and certainly appreciative of the work.

“It’s got to be terribly frustrating to them” to be out of their house so long, he said. “When you rely on volunteers you have to be patient.”

The other house, the one the father watched drift away, has been moved to higher ground the family owns, as a safeguard against any future floods. The man owns a heating and air conditioning business and has helped many others get heating and cooling back on at their homes. The Greenfield team painted, laid a floor and installed kitchen cabinets in the home.

Feister said she learned more about flooring than she had ever known before. She carried pieces for cutting and watched as team members with the right expertise popped the tongue-and-groove planks into place.

She said she’ll remember the communal aspect of traveling there and working on the project with fellow church members. Meals were a group effort. At night, the team cooked together in a former Methodist church building, vacant since the congregation moved, that has become housing for disaster relief teams. The women retired to a dorm-style area with bunk beds. Men slept in the sanctuary on mattresses.

When they needed food or supplies, they ended up at a local Kmart, Feister said. On their first such trip, a cashier asked what brought them to town, and they told her.

“She said, ‘Well, thank you very much for coming. We really appreciate it,’” Feister recalled. That personal touch marked the rest of their stops there, she said.

Team members know other tragedies have struck since the 2016 flood. They are glad people are reaching out to help those displaced by the 2017 hurricanes, for example. But they’ve tried to also remember those who still need help after much of the public attention shifts.

“With other tragedies (occurring), people say, ‘Now I need to focus on that,’” Feister said. “I think people don’t realize how long-term it can be.”

The church sent a team to New Orleans to help with a Habitat for Humanity project nine years after Hurricane Katrina. A group went to Minot, North Dakota, two years after flooding there; Limpus remembers hanging drywall and working on a couple of kitchens during that trip.

“To give four or five days of your time every so often is such a small inconvenience (compared to) the tremendous help it was for the people we were working for,” Limpus said. “You can put yourself in their position of sitting looking at your house in ruins for a couple of years.”

Livingston said he’ll long remember the great team of workers he led to West Virginia, the gratitude of the people they were helping, and the resilience he saw in them.

He remembers the father talking about wanting to salvage something from the house but, feeling the panic as the floodwaters rose, getting nothing.

And yet, the father said — choking up nearly two years later — with his family evacuated, he knew all that was most important was out of the house.