Recovering from the Flooding

Life here in Colorado is slowly returning to normal after last week's massive rain storm and subsequent flooding. The kids in my town are back to school today for the first time since this all went down. While the flood waters are slowly receding, the impact of the massive flooding that split my town in half for a few days is making itself felt. While my neighborhood escaped with no issues, several others near by were devastated.

Yesterday, I helped organize several volunteers from the Boy Scout troop my family belongs to and we went out to one of the neighborhoods that had been hit pretty hard to see if there was anything we could do to help homeowners. Our offer of assistance was readily accepted by one family who were in the process of clearing out their grandparent's flooded basement. The really neat thing was that the grandfather who was 80+ years old, was also an Eagle Scout. 

Our group of over two dozen volunteers, most of them boys, descended upon the house and in two and a half hours had the basement emptied of possessions, damaged and destroyed items on the trash heap, items that survived stored safely in the garage, and damaged drywall and insulation ripped out. The thing that was most amazing about our group were the boys, who were genuinely happy to be there helping out.

Our Boy Scout group is no stranger to community service. We often have several service projects through out the year along with the boys who are working on their Eagle Rank and have to organize and oversee a service project as their final step before earning Eagle. However, I think that there is a difference between spending a couple of hours picking up trash along a creek or pulling out weeds and responding to people in need after a natural disaster like a flood. I think that for may of our boys yesterday, things got really real walking through the neighborhood and seeing people's ruined belongings in piles at the curb, items that included TVs, video games, toys... Things that are important to almost every adolescent and pre-adolescent.

I was really proud of our troop, and glad to be apart of an organization like Boy Scouts of America. It is a tribute to an institution like BSA that a group of boys was willing to give up their last afternoon off before having to go back to school to come down and help neighbors and citizens in need. Not only their willingness to help, but to roll up their sleeves and jump into the grime and muck with smiles on their faces and joy in their hearts. 

The neighborhood the Boy Scouts went to help out in

The culmination of a lot of hard work and clean up by the boys and home owners