wfn.org | West Virginia to vote on expanding work camp ministry to assist flood survivors

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Note #7062 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

21-February-2002
02073

Deluged by need

West Virginia to vote on expanding work camp ministry to assist flood survivors

by Alexa Smith

DRY CREEK, West Virginia - Marge Booth knows every inch of Shirley O'Meara's teeny house. Small wonder: She's the one who ripped the soggy plaster out and put down new floor boards bought with money from O'Meara's disaster grant from the government. 

Booth had a new hot water tank on order for O'Meara. An all-white bathtub was out in the backyard, awaiting installation. She meant to have her neighbor's flood-damaged house rebuilt in the spring.

But her intended Easter deadline will never be met because O'Meara decided she really didn't want to move back into a house so seriously damaged last July when three floods swept across 26 southern West Virginia counties.

"That's life, you know," Booth says with a shrug. "This woman has been living with fear that it may flood again." She shoves her hands deep into the pockets of a dusty pair of dungarees she wears when she's supervising whatever job has been assigned to her volunteer church crew. 

Booth's crew has been busy since last summer's flooding. About 460 people still haven't been able to return to their homes. About 125 are living in small, government-provided trailers.

So far, state and federal governments have invested about $180 million in flood recovery. But the job isn't finished by a long shot.

O'Meara's little house is one of many that were wrecked when a light Sunday rain became a rampaging wall of water. After eight months of living with her mother, O'Meara opted to put a trailer on her property further back from the creek, rather than fixing her old house.

"I think if we could have gotten more work camps in there, got it finished sooner, it may have been all right," Booth says. But there was too much to do, and too few volunteers to get it done quickly.

Booth, a lay preacher and master electrician, was organizing church-based work teams to help needy West Virginians even before the floods hit. They repaired houses for folks who couldn't fix their own or pay to have them fixed. 

The work in Dry Creek is sponsored by the Presbytery of West Virginia and her home church, First Presbyterian, in Belair, MD, and funded through an extra commitment opportunity account (ECO#050319) of the Presbytery of Baltimore. 

The West Virginia Mission of Advocacy and Work Camps has been on the job for 12 years, bringing together volunteers with the requisite skills. Some know all the finer points of drywall, some know how to swing a hammer.

The flood damage complicated the schedule.

Although non-flood-related projects do still get done, Booth admits that some projects get delayed longer than she likes. She worries about those who linger on the waiting list - the man who needs a handicapped ramp built onto his porch, the elderly woman with the leaky toilet. 

"I'm not a spring chicken anymore," she says with a laugh.  "I'm more like an old hen."

The presbytery is considering expanding the work-camp ministry to reach more people directly impacted by the flood. The idea is to begin in Booth's turf, in the deep-mined mountains near Beckley.

Bonnie Mallott, who literally got her feet wet in the flood-recovery work, is pushing for the expansion.

"We've had nine or 10 groups through the winter, but starting in March and going through August, we have about 40 groups scheduled," she says in her soft Texas drawl, a reminder that most volunteers are from out of state. "And there's plenty of work for everybody."

West Virginia Presbytery will vote this weekend whether to hire a third staff person to direct work camps in the flood plain, as a pilot project. 

"I want to see us expand in a number of directions," Mallott says. "Do more briefings with workers about how to relate to survivors of the flood ... (and about) working within the Appalachian culture."

Mallott says lots of volunteers have made themselves available, but the work is almost endless. One of the Presbyterian workers says she has 127 open cases in Raleigh County alone.

At the December meeting of the Unmet Needs Committee in Booth's manse in Dry Creek, one hears a familiar litany. A case worker says, "People are saying that they can't get help ... contractors are so backed up." Another brings up the plight of the elderly people in Oceana, a little town that the flood rolled over, who don't know how to fill out applications for relief. Case manager Barbara Wallace of Kopperston mentions a woman who has been washing her dishes in the bathtub since the flood ruined her kitchen.

"We need to always be here," says Booth, who has been ministering in West Virginia for several years and is well-acquainted with local realities. "People just fall through the cracks. There are people here who will never be able to afford a loan because they'll never be able to make the payments."

The Rev. Dick Krajeski, a seasoned coordinator for the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) Network, also a West Virginian, says he's never seen anything quite like this disaster. He thinks the presbytery's instinct to build a long-term recovery network of volunteers is a good idea.

Eight months after the flooding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lists 340 West Virginians who still live in government-issue mobile homes, including some temporary trailers with no insulation.
 
"We had 4,000 homes destroyed or damaged," says Frank Blake of FEMA, which has processed more than 15,000 applications for assistance. "That's a lot of homes. And that's been the major problem, helping people find permanent housing. There just aren't a lot of vacant homes here."

There are also numerous West Virginians who didn't apply for aid - and they are the ones who really worry the presbytery's disaster team. 

As Krajeski puts it: "You have to be culturally sensitive here. People here want to be self-sufficient rather than say that they want assistance. This is a (relief) system that was built for the Washington suburbs."

In especially isolated areas, people may not have telephones, or may not be able to read and write well enough to complete the government forms. But there's another barrier, too: West Virginians are often wary of outsiders, especially ones who want their signature on government papers.

"Mountain people have good reason to be suspicious of outsiders," says Krajeski. "There's a whole history of abuse by outsiders here."

So Mallott is knuckling down to get work camps organized to offer help through a trusted channel - the church.

"The people who immediately mobilized themselves after the flood are getting their lives back," she says. "Others are still trying to get Small Business Administration loans, and are waiting on the bureaucracy. They've been applying for three months and still haven't made any (progress). ... Everything I read says that this is the way it always is ...

Mallot says the people work groups will assist cross economic brackets.

"Not just the really poor end up in a mess," she says, noting that some people are paying mortgages on homes that have been destroyed while also paying on loans for rebuilding. "Like one of the women here tells me: She's 'too poor to be rich and too rich to be poor.'"

But a lot of people were in dire straits before the floods hit.

Booth, who says she doesn't intend to retire when she becomes eligible in 12 years because there is too much work to do, believes that too many West Virginians live in substandard, unsafe housing.

"The flood just makes the poverty that's already there more visible," she says. "There are pockets of West Virginia that are a third-world country. But because it is in the United States, we don't like to think of it that way.

"That's why work camps are such a vital mission. The need is so great."
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