Inside of house after significant clean up. CLICK HERE to view photo album

On Friday evening, October 14, 16 people from Wilmore Free Methodist Church (11 adults, 5 teens) drove all night to Bay St. Louis, MS, to participate in the hurricane clean-up efforts there. We were hosted by First Presbyterian Church of Bay St. Louis.  First Presbyterian is the central location of recovery efforts for the Presbyterian Church USA. An administrator has been hired and is stationed there to direct volunteer teams in clean-up efforts. Our team had no idea what we’d be doing.

We began to see broken trees and tarped roofs at least 50-75 miles inland, but the devastation along the gulf shore was unbelievable, even almost two months after the storms. Mile after mile of Route 90 stands as a witness to the power of wind and water: stores blown down or apart, hundreds of ruined cars in ditches and wooded areas, bridges destroyed, beaches completely restructured. In Bay St. Louis, where there was once a bayside asphalt road and a 30-foot drop to the beach, there is now no road at all and only a five-foot drop. The landscape changed instantly.

Our team “gutted” two houses that were structurally sound and rebuildable, but had been completely submerged — one in 16 feet of water, the other in 30 feet of water. Gutting a house means removing all the household belongings and salvaging those things salvageable, which in most cases was very little. We shoveled out the mud and remaining water.  We removed the furniture, appliances (including refrigerators and freezers still full of rotten food), carpet and padding, drywall, insulation, trim, doors, and in most cases the windows, and deposited all these things in the roadside drainage ditch for city contractors to pick up with loaders, place in enormous trucks, and haul to some unfortunate landfill. 

The pile of “junk” at one house was nearly 100 feet long, 15 feet wide and 15 feet tall. The pile of salvaged possessions could fit in the back of a small pickup truck. We're told that contractors are charging between $5,000 and $7,000 to gut a house, meaning our team saved two families quite a bit of money. However, the blessing and pleasure were all ours.

We returned to Wilmore the evening of October 19. I've been told that the present population of Bay St. Louis is only about 20 percent of what it was before the storms.  Only five members (out of nearly 100) of First Presbyterian Church are planning to return. This pattern may be more devastating to the town than the storm itself. 

One bright spot in all this was the number of church vans we saw all over the area. There were teams working everywhere doing clean-up, feeding the homeless, providing shelter ... helping those who could not help themselves. In the midst of all the publicity regarding the criticisms of FEMA and other government agencies, the church moves on, quietly doing the work Jesus called it to do. The task is enormous and more help is needed, but progress is slowly being made, one individual at a time. 

Daryl Diddle, for the Wilmore Free Methodist Church for the Katrina Relief Team, October, 2005

Team Members: Tommy Baker, Esther Brooks, James Demaray, Shawn Demaray, Daryl Diddle, David Hanna, Lee Koss, Maxine Koss, Keith Madill, Bob Moody, Susanna Roller, Matt Strimback, Andrew Sweigard, Chris Troutman, Bethany Ury, Greg Welch