Lots of flooding in Northern Ohio

If you would like to help, please contact me by email or on my cell phone (listed to the right).

Snowfall from last week melting with rainfall last night has created major flooding in Findlay, Lima, and some other Northern Ohio towns. I don't know what I can do or organize or whether people are interested in going up to help the cleanup. For that matter it's still too early to judge whether the areas of damage are wide spread enough to require help from outside the local communities to clean it up.

Areas marked with purple on this National Weather Service map are where the need for help will be greatest. I'll keep my eye on the needs, but I'm not going to be able to go up and do a survey till the weekend.

This does not appear to be as widespread or severe as August 2007 when we spent several weeks working in Bucyrus area and other groups worked in Findlay. During that response, we made contact with EMA directors for several counties and ended up working with Tim Flock in Crawford County (Bucyrus). We helped a local resident with some disaster relief experience set up intake for residents with needs and organization for volunteers during the initial effort. FEMA ended up declaring a disaster area and the process became more formalized after a few weeks and was taken over by our VOAD. In Ohio, that's Lutheran Disaster Services.

I get information and updates from LDS, Mennonite Disaster Services which is active in the area, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, and Methodist Disaster Services. I'll post any information from those organizations or any additional information I collect here.

Please pray for those who have lost property and vehicles in the flash flooding, that they will find help that they need and find that Jesus is looking out for them.

Servants Unite!
John McGuire