KERR COUNTY, Texas – Groups of nonprofits and volunteers from around the country have been spending the following weeks after deadly flooding in the Hill Country cleaning as many flooded homes as they can.
“Mucking and Gutting”, as it’s sometimes called, is the process of stripping drywall, insulation, and flooring away from a flooded structure so it can start to dry out from the moisture inside. Failure to do so in a timely manner can cause damage to the home or allow mold and mildew to grow inside.
“Today I’ve got a pretty much, on average, of ten people per work group, and we’re stretched all the way from the further reaches of Hunt down into Ingram,” said Bob Burke, Deployment Manager with Operation Blessing.
Burke and Operation Blessing have been sending out teams to do demolition work on homes, focusing on making sure that flooded residents don’t pay a dime for the nonprofit’s assistance.
“If, for example, one had three feet of water in here, yeah, we took out the wall at four feet because it seemed to have not worked above that. There’s another house we’re doing today where we’re taking the walls out all the way to the ceiling. If those are the main things you need to know about it, you really just everything that you’re doing needs to be dry,” he continued.
Burke recommends making sure utilities are turned off and any crews working inside homes have proper protective equipment like gloves, safety glasses and masks, if needed. He says that while professional crews can do this work for a fee, there are still plenty of volunteers in the area looking to help.
“We had 100 people yesterday. Yeah. And we have over 60 today. We had 70 the day before yesterday. I have churches calling, just huge groups wanting to come in. My job has been running around and finding the jobs for them to do.”
If you’d like to get free assistance with cleaning work for the flood, you can look around in person for the volunteers making their way across the area or go to Operation Blessing’s website for more.
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