New Sharon Fire Once Again Answering The Call For Help

New Sharon fire member Dustin Briggs works to remove ceiling tile Friday afternoon.

New Sharon fire member Dustin Briggs works to remove ceiling tile Friday afternoon.

Independence, Louisiana – This small town of nearly 2000 people was flooded up to their windows when catastrophic rains hammered their area during the month of August.

The floors of the structure being demoed are still slick with the mud washed into the home by the nearby creek. The waters had risen to over the top of this structure during the height of the flooding.

Three volunteers from New Sharon Fire and Rescue made the trip to Independence, Louisiana, leaving Mahaska County at 6pm after working a full day, then driving all night, taking shifts behind the wheel. The group arrived to the fire station in Independence at 8:30am.

New Sharon’s Fire Captain is no stranger to responding to natural disasters. He and various volunteers from the New Sharon Department have responded to the call for help from Hurricane Katrina and Super-storm Sandy, among others.

  1. The crew from New Sharon were joined by the friends from Bioloxi, Mississippi Fire. Gerard and many from the Biloxi crew have worked at other natural disasters in the past, many times shoulder to shoulder, just like this Friday morning.

The first request for help was to visit a campground that has several cabins, which had been underwater.

Gerard, like the other two New Sharon volunteers, had had little sleep, awake for the better part of two days. But, after a light breakfast, they got down to the task of removing the wall coverings in the target structure.

The plan with removing the wall coverings is to help the walls dry out. When those have finished drying, the ceilings will come down. “In order to get them dried out and eleminate any mold in them, to put them back together, that’s what we’ve got to do.”

The temperature was hovering near 94 degrees, and the humity was near 90 percent with nearly no breeze, so the work was hot and miserable. Old insulation stuck to your arms.

With that humidity, the smell of mold is filling the air, and with that the sense of urgency to get the structures gutted and ready to be repaired.

With so many people displaced, repairing structures as quickly as possible is a top priority.

The smell and grueling work reminds Gerard mostly of his time cleaning up after Katrina. That deadly hurricane hit in the Biloxi, Mississippi area, and is the foundation of the friendship that has grown between those two departments.

There is little problem finding a need, looking 100 yards down the road is the crews next project home.

“It was just like another Katrina. I promise you that”, said one local volunteer firefighter during the cleanup efforts.

The flooding in Lousinana would be classified as one of the top 10 most costly hurricaines if it had been a named storm.

The natural distaster unfolded with nearly no media attention, and only recently has been brought forward into the nation’s attention.

 

 

Posted by on Aug 26 2016. Filed under Local News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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