On May 28, the EF3 tornado followed a path from Weldon Spring to north St. Louis County. Now, Missouri Disaster Relief is working the same path.
“I’m going to drive into the Bellefontaine area tomorrow,” Paul Posey, site coordinator for Missouri, “there is a lot of damage there.”
Posey is directing one site headquartered at North County Christian School and the other area command center is located at Jungs Station Baptist Church to be closer to the St. Charles damage. According to Posey, the Incident Command Center is headquartered at Hazelwood Baptist Church.
“The Incident Command Center is the center for all information to be pooled,” Posey said. “The Incident Command Center gives both area command centers assignments and plans.”
Disaster Relief has approximately 62 people working at the two area commands. The workers are from St. Louis, Tennessee, Mississippi and out-state Missouri.
“We’re focusing on priority-one housing,” Posey said. “’Priority one’ is housing with trees on the roof, with punched holes in the roof, or with trees blocking the entrance to the house.”
Posey said one of the main jobs is moving and cutting trees by using a skid loader. “The skid loader has grappler attachments. We are able to move the trees to a safe spot and cut them,” he said.
Sharon Hancock, member of First Baptist Church, Ferguson, is working with Disaster Relief to fix meals for the workers. In addition to serving food to the Disaster Relief workers, she and the other kitchen workers were able to serve sandwiches to some of the victims of the tornado.
“We had a donation by QT of 800 sandwiches,” Hancock said. “We were able to take the sandwiches to the community. The people didn’t have power and they were hot and hungry,” she said.
Posey said all of the members of the Disaster Relief teams serve from love. “We believe God called us to this ministry,” he said. “We do this to show God’s love. We have skills and equipment. We can use these to help people in need.”