Bucyrus Status Update

Thanks to all of you who have spent a day or more working in Bucyrus to help in the recovery up there. We’ve gotten a lot accomplished as you can see in the blog posting from Linn last week. I wanted to get you an update to keep you all in sync for where we are and what will still be needed.

We got most of the requests for mucking out taken care of by end of day Saturday, though I expect more will come in. Mostly we got a big peak of them a week ago and got a lot of them cleaned out. We also eliminated several dozen requests as unreasonable, due to dangerous or extremely uncomfortable conditions. There was still one resident who came in Saturday to complain her husband wouldn’t listen to the need to take out his drywall. She was suffering respiratory problems and had sores on her arms from the contamination in her house. A few stragglers like this may still require demucking as residents are forced to request help.

The first response operation we set up is disbanding Tuesday, and rolling responsibility over to a long term recovery committee. It will be made up of county and city officials and trained by the Ohio VOAD. They are hiring a couple caseworkers to qualify residents and will start that process tomorrow or Tuesday. In a couple weeks, they expect to have some of the midterm needs identified where we can start helping people rebuild and handle any new requests for muck out.

What this means is that we have a couple weeks of hiatus between the mucking work we’ve completed and the need for volunteers to participate in the reconstruction work. That works well as these places need time to dry out. I’m hearing moisture readings need to be between 15% and 20% in the studs to start rebuilding.

I’m dropping back to managing the resources we have available once people are identified for private aid and I’m hoping my new friend Linn who lives there is going to assist in that. We have money to buy some building materials for that process from some local companies, some local churches, and a couple of the national relief orgs. Another Ohio flood relief group from over by Wheeling is setting me up with places to get grants for a lot of this as well. We have the same locations for out of town volunteer accommodations for that phase.

Your continued support will be needed in coming months to help get people back in to permanent housing. 70+ destroyed housing units will need to be replaced so I expect to have some Habitat builds for us to work on. I’ll keep you all posted as things change and plans solidify.

Thanks again for your servants hearts and continued support of this effort.

John McGuire