Churches unite for flood relief
By Craig McEwen
The Forum
A coalition of religious groups – Lutherans, Catholics and Episcopalians – are bringing help and hope to flood-ravaged residents of the Red River Valley.

Eighteen semi loads of donated food and other supplies have been shipped to the Great Plains Food Bank in Fargo to be dispersed to 185 area food pantries and feeding stations.

"And of course we’re really just getting rolling on this," said Steve Sellent, food bank director. "I’m going to guess we’re going to bring 100 semi loads of product into the area when it’s all said and done. It’s going out almost as fast as it’s coming in."

Teams of counselors are being dispatched to help victims – whose lives were toppled by a flood that turned cities to ruin, destroyed homes and transformed precious memorabilia into mud-basted garbage – cope with their loss.

This weekend volunteers are being trained to help flood victims clean their homes, said Bonnie Turner, disaster relief coordinator for the Christian Disaster Response Task Force.

Turner, who is in Fargo, has received calls from as far away as New York, Chicago and Seattle from people volunteering to help. That cleanup effort will begin in about a week, she said.

Just two weeks ago Turner was busy dispersing $100,000 worth of equipment – generators, pumps, hoses, space heaters, power washers, flashlights, lanterns and hip-waders – that the coalition loaned to people who were fighting to save their homes from swollen rivers and overland flooding.

She had planned to open an office in Grand Forks, N.D., the day before the flood hit. "We had a Ryder truck full of equipment that now sits in water," she said.

Many flood victims still need a place to stay. The coalition is linking them with private families who are willing to open their homes for up to 30 days, said the Rev. Keith Ingle, president of Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota in Fargo, the agency that has spearheaded the joint response.

"We began to pull the coalition together about six to eight weeks ago when it became obvious that winter was going to have a significant impact and the potential for the flood was going to be fairly dramatic," Ingle said.

The coalition’s membership includes the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Catholic Family Services, the Episcopal Church, Aid Association for Lutherans, Lutheran Brotherhood, and LSS Minnesota and North Dakota.

"We really want to make it as broad-based an endeavor as we possibly can," Ingle said. Much of its efforts will involve hundreds of volunteers from church congregations throughout the Red River Valley.

It is hoped that the coalition will be able to supply needs that the American Red Cross, Salvation Army and FEMA cannot meet, Ingle said. "In a sense we want to be the Elmer’s glue that fills in the cracks for people’s needs."

The Great Plains Food Bank, a program run by LSS-North Dakota, is also supplying American Red Cross and Salvation Army feeding stations.

Some of the donated food is being shipped to Great Plains from Second Harvest, a national network of 180 food banks that solicits and collects food from wholesalers and retailers nationwide, Ingle said.

"People all around the country are kind of taking this to heart and want to help out," said Sellent.

There is more cooperation than he has witnessed in past disasters, Sellent said. "Everybody’s not trying to do their own thing and get their own glory."

The same is true among Christian Disaster Task Force members.

"There’s no issues of turf, there’s no issues of frontline or who gets the top billing on this thing," Ingle said. "People have been just impressively cooperative and realize that we’re in this thing together."

Dealing with a flood of this magnitude will not be easy, Ingle said. "There’s no road map on this. There’s no procedural manual on a whole city literally being wiped out like this."

A lot of people – including parents, children and elderly – are going to need special care, Ingle said. "The real grieving – real anger – is going to come four to six months from now when they find out the insurance didn’t cover it, FEMA’s not going to be able to do all of it, that they’ve been out of work for six months."

For 20 years, Ingle, a Jamestown, N.D. native, has worked for LSS in several states.

"I’ve dealt with an awful lot of crisis situations," he said, but none this complex.

Ingle said he is going to beg, borrow and steal help from people all across the country.

"We have some folks down in the Virgin Islands that have been through this stuff with hurricanes. The church has said – we’ll send them," Ingle said. "They could teach us what to do and what not to do."