Friday, June 20, 2008

Flood Update & Pictures

What a week this has been! While we have gotten a lot accomplished, there is still so much to be done. Wednesday, we had a crew of 5 guys come up from Knoxville, IA, who attend the church we used to pastor. They were SUCH A BLESSING! They stayed all day long and helped us gut out our grandparents' basement, and cleaned out our basement as well! They worked SO hard and we are sooo appreciative. We could have never got that much done in one day! We also cleaned out our back garage - we lost just about everything that was back there. But we were so fortunate compared to many other people!

Our house was a wreck, which was hard to see since it was so beautiful before. The hardwood floors and carpet were ruined and the basement was full of mud. It was a mess. The crew from Knoxville helped us clean so much of that out.

At my grandparents', we had to take out the ceiling tiles, take out the sheetrock, disassemble some kitchen cabinets, a countertop w/ sink, and a toilet. That was quite a job - but we had a lot of fun! :-) We were all so dirty! The sad part about this day was that I forgot my camera!! Agh! Sorry - no pictures from that day.

But I do have some pictures of the flood. Now, keep in mind that these pictures were taken almost a week after the flood had hit (last Saturday & Sunday), so the waters are extremely low. I don't want you looking at them, thinking "This is the flood that was supposedly so bad??"! If you have seen pictures on the news, etc., you know how bad it was.

This is actually the river, which was still flooded a bit.















The flood waters created these holes in this alley next to my grandparents' house

This is just the beginning of my grandparents' growing junk pile


Pitching in at grandpa and grandma's house


I found this among my grandparents' things - I thought it fit us where we are at








The waters washed out part of this basement

I thought this was SO weird! This is a pet store called "The Floodzone" - how coincidental!

These pictures don't do it justice. I'm not trying to make it sound like more than it really was, but the destruction was so bad - people are hurting and homeless, there are those who don't have anything, and there are those, like us, who were able to save almost everything, but their house is such a wreck. Many have decided to just sell their houses because they are so sick of it.
In answer to a question asked in a comment, we will not be returning to our house. Actually, we had our house up for sale when the flood hit, so now we have just completely moved out. We already had a house lined up to rent, so we have moved into that. It's a blessing that we had somewhere to go! Continue to pray - we still have work that needs to be done on our house and at my grandparents', and we are trying to make this new house a home at the same time.
It's so good to know that throughout all of this, GOD IS STILL GOD!

3 comments:

Abby said...

Oh, Tori...I feel bad for your family and others. :( It's a sad thing, and a hard thing to deal with. I hope you guys are managing well...

Margaret Braun said...

I suppose this is why Jesus told us to lay up treasure in heaven. That a lot of water and a real mess.

A Joyful Heart said...

Oh, how awful!

That IS very strange about the pet store.