wfn.org | Volunteers assess victims' needs after Nashville tornadoes

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

April 24, 1998     Contact: Tim Tanton*(615)742-5470*Nashville, Tenn.
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NOTE:  This story can accompany UMNS #249 and #251.

By Cathy Farmer*

NASHVILLE (UMNS) -- Relief workers at East End United Methodist Church
thought they had already seen the worst. 

Crisis after crisis had rocked the crew manning the United Methodist
Committee on Relief command post at the church, but the volunteers had
weathered those challenges, just like East Nashville had weathered a
pair of gigantic twisters three days earlier on April 16.

"That Sunday afternoon, when the Stephen Ministers arrived to help us
canvass the neighborhood, I really believed it was just a matter of
clean-up from then on," said Becky Waldrop, wife of East End's pastor,
Mike Waldrop, and part of the UMCOR team. 

"Everything started so calmly. The 80 Stephen Ministers were
well-trained and organized," she said. "They're so responsive to people,
that people who might not talk to someone else open up to them."

The ministers fanned out from the church, carrying cellular phones so
they could report back to the command post as they discovered needs in
the surrounding homes.

"About an hour after they left, the calls started coming in," Waldrop
said. "Desperate calls."

One Stephen minister reported a street with three dangerous gas leaks,
she said. "We thought all the gas leaks had been plugged days earlier."

Another reported that she was finding dozens of elderly people huddling
in their homes, too frightened to sleep, afraid to move, afraid their
roofs would fall in, cold and hungry. She had even discovered a "nursing
home" with 10 or 11 residents who had been left without care for three
days.

"When one of the Stephen Ministers, a pretty young woman, came in and
started reading her list of problems to us, she began by saying she'd
found a dead body at 32 Calvin St.," Waldrop said. "Everyone in the
kitchen turned to stare at her."

However, the group learned that the dead person hadn't been killed by
the tornado. "She died after the storm, but no one had been able to get
in and take her body out, according to her daughter," Waldrop said.

"It was terrible," she remembered. "We felt such guilt that we hadn't
been there already. But we had been doing everything we could. To think
of all those old people, cold and frightened. When we found them, mostly
they just asked for hot coffee because they were so cold."

"Sunday felt like chaos," she said. "It felt like the end of the world."

# # #

* Farmer is communications director for the Memphis Conference of the
United Methodist Church

United Methodist News Service
(615)742-5470
Releases and photos also available at
http://www.umc.org/umns/