Disaster Relief in Texas
At 2:45 Saturday morning, a group of 68 youth and team leaders left the Homestead Market parking lot in Waco, Texas, caravanning south with equipment in tow—33 chainsaws, 5 skid steers, 8 dump trailers, 2 mini excavators, and lots of small hand tools like shovels and rakes.
The team arrived at the volunteer fire department in Hunt, Texas, around 6:30 A.M., just ahead of thousands of other volunteers. Ever since the devastating July 4th floods on the Guadalupe River, our church has been looking for an opportunity to serve those who had been impacted by this tragedy.
Our group was assigned to muck out and clean the Heart O’ the Hills camp. The devastation was shocking. The building our team worked in sat roughly 25 feet above the river and over 100 yards from it—yet the waterline reached just 18 inches below the second-floor ceiling.
Because this particular camp was between sessions when the July 4th floods hit, only a few staff members were on site. Jane Ragsdale, the camp’s owner, was the only one who didn’t make it out. She called her brother when floodwaters reached her bed, and he tried to help her escape through a window, but the call was lost.
Our team completely gutted and cleaned both floors of the camp’s main lodge and cleaned up the grounds as well. Dan, the man overseeing the project, said they did five days of work in less than one day!
Jane’s brother Jeeper and her son Dean spent much of the day with our church’s volunteers. During lunch, Dean stood on a bench and expressed his gratitude:
“This means a ton to me, but y’all helping out here means so much more to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the United States and the world that have had their lives touched by this place. We wouldn’t be able to do this without all y’all here, you know, and the only reason that the wheels haven’t fallen off for me is because of the tremendous outpouring of support we’ve had. I can’t thank y’all enough. God bless y’all.”
Everyone came home exhausted but also grateful for the opportunity to help. Ezra Cunningham said, “It was both humbling and an honor to participate in serving alongside hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers that poured into the surrounding area to offer support to all those in such a desperate need.”
Asher Linzer summed it up, “This is what it means to live out our faith.”
