English
Korean
Spanish
STRAWN—Southern Baptists of Texas Convention Disaster Relief volunteers were continuing to serve those affected by wildfires in the western half of the state leading up to Good Friday.
A 10-person feeding unit was serving in Strawn—70 miles west of Fort Worth—coordinating with The Salvation Army to provide meals for firefighters and other emergency personnel as fires had ravaged almost 150,000 acres and hundreds of homes and buildings in that region.
The team spent their nights at First Baptist Church of Gordon after a firefighter who is a member of the church insisted they use the church for their berthing.
Meanwhile, an SBTC clean-up and recovery team was working with Texas Baptist Men to help clear debris from more than 20 burned homes around Fort Davis in far southwest Texas that caught fire the second week of April.
SBTC volunteers were being housed at Davis Mountain Baptist Church. Fort Davis is about 220 miles southeast of El Paso and 175 miles southwest of Midland on the front edge of the southern Rocky Mountains.
In four counties west of Fort Worth, the 150,000 acres that had burned by April 20 amounted to the equivalent of 200 square miles, news reports said. All told, wildfires had torched more than 1.5 million acres and nearly 250 homes this spring across Texas, the governor’s office reported.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry on April 16 requested that President Obama issue a Major Disaster Declaration to make the state eligible for response and recovery assistance from the federal government.
In Strawn, Disaster Relief volunteers clad in their trademark yellow shirts teamed with the Salvation Army to feed weary firefighters working round the clock.
“Last night from the canteens you could see a line of fire a mile long. We were driving to the church and could see the fires off in the distance,” said Jodie Liford, the “blue hat” in charge of the SBTC team and a DR chaplain. “These firefighters are giving their all and we’re trying to give them double portions because they are burning so many calories.
“They are wearing pounds of equipment in 100-degree weather. It’s very windy and smoky. They are working all night long. We have to feed them to keep their energy up. We can’t feed them enough. But God’s here and he’s working.”
Winds on April 19 turned from south to north, creating tactical challenges for firefighters and fueling more fires.
During a phone interview, Liford noted that the Salvation Army tent had just blown over.
“Even with conditions the way they are, everyone is working as a cohesive team. No ‘I’ out here,” said Liford, a member of Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall.
The team members arrived on April 18 and planned to stay for several more days before being relieved, if necessary, by other volunteers.
The team members working in Strawn came from Lake Pointe, Valley Creek Baptist Church in Leonard, Northside Baptist in Mesquite and First Baptist Melissa.
“I think we’ve had a great witness to the people we are serving, as well as with the guys at the incident command center in Strawn,” said Liford, stressing that emergency personnel eat and promptly leave because of the urgency involved.
“You never know what God is doing in the people around you. You can be somewhere serving and then a year after that somebody gets saved because a seed was planted. Imagine all the things we will only get to see when we are on the other side in Heaven.”
Jerry Bishop, the blue hat on the cleanup and recovery team serving in Fort Davis, said the work on the homes there was expected to be complete by Good Friday.
Bishop and some of his team arrived there on April 13 and stayed one week before being relieved by other DR volunteers.
Over a week and a half of work there, 18 SBTC volunteers worked to clean up debris, often alongside homeowners, one of whom traveled from Canada.
“This was his vacation home. He helped us clean it yesterday,” Bishop said on April 19. “He lost everything there. Beautiful home up on top of the mountain.”
Among the group were three people trained in chaplaincy, which is valuable, Bishop said, when people are devastated by natural disasters.
“The people there were real nice,” he added. “We had a lot of help from day one. We had a lady help us who had done the census. During the assessment phase, she rode along and led the way. She knew every street, everyone’s name. That really helped us.”
In the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, rain and hail dampened the area on April 19 but left the region to the west without a drop, extending what weather observers say is one of the worst droughts on record in much of Texas.
Of the state’s 254 counties, 198 were under burn bans as of April 18, according to the Texas Forest Service.
The neighboring states of Oklahoma and New Mexico are at near-record drought levels as well, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a collection of drought data at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
