Disaster Relief

Last December I called an old friend and asked her for help finding a site for me to take the Presbytery of the James disaster relief team to for a winter trip — hopefully going to a warm climate, but not over a day’s drive south from Richmond. She got back to me a week later. She had found an elderly couple who owned their home outright (but had no insurance) who were in big trouble. Hurricane Helene had brought high winds to Augusta, Georgia, pushing two huge trees onto their home — crushing 13 of their roof trusses. She wanted to know if I could put a team together to clean up the debris, replace the trusses, replace the roof and all related finish work, repair broken walls, windows, and doors, reinsulate, hang drywall on the new ceiling, and get them ready to put finishing touches on and move in.

Normally, we work on homes that other teams have worked on before us and that other teams will work on after us. In this case, she had no other teams coming and wanted us to do it all.

I told her we would do it. We scurried around and found St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church a few miles away. They agreed to let us sleep there and use their kitchen for cooking. Now we were set.

I sent an email out looking for volunteers and had 10 folks respond — some for one week, some for two weeks. On February 23rd, seven of us set out for Augusta. With Barry Rae’s expertise in construction, we carefully dissected the rubble, surgically replaced the damaged trusses (over 50% of the roof), and reinstalled shingles and the related adornments to roofing by the end of the first week.

We got a scare midweek — the owner had failed to get the proper building permit. However, after jumping through some hoops and with the kind help of the building inspector himself, we got that fixed and were able to continue our work.

So, during the second week, we repaired inside walls, insulated walls and ceilings, hung the ceiling drywall, repaired the kitchen cabinets, and replaced the back French doors and a window that had broken from the tree damage.

We ended up staying for an extra day and a half. We were so close to having the house ready for inspections that the team voted Friday night to stay to “get ’er done!” So instead of leaving Saturday morning, we left Sunday at lunchtime. That extra time was worth it. It made it when I got word that the building inspector (who came after we had gone) gave us a 100% satisfactory pass.

The homeowners were left with jobs they could handle with family members and friends. His son-in-law is a plumber — he told me he would handle the bathrooms. That left a few sheets of drywall, finishing and painting the drywall, installing LVT flooring, and the trim. As of this writing, family and friends are installing the LVT flooring, so it won’t be long before they are back in their home.