There’s about 6 feet from the hillside to the backside of her trailer’s garage, and the water level was rising up the side of the garage quickly. With her then 6-year-old great niece Payton Smith with her, Shafer opened the back door of her garage, but the water started to flow into the garage rapidly, too. But fixing that turned out to be easy.

“I just opened the garage door and let it keep flowing down to the creek,” Shafer said.

Shafer was able to keep the flooding from destroying her garage, but it completely devastated the basement of her Clendenin, West Virginia house and left it covered in mold. For three years, there’s been no way to fix that. There’s a creek in between the trailer and the road, and the flood destroyed the bridge that crossed the creek.

Now, three years later, Shafer and her partner Wayne Tyler are finally getting their bridge rebuilt, thanks to the West Virginia chapter of the Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters, known by the acronym VOAD.

For Jenny Gannaway, executive director of WV VOAD, being able to direct where all of the volunteers go is vital to making sure the organizations are “not stepping on each other’s toes.”

“For instance, with all the flood buckets after a flood, we don’t want them all to go to one town and not the other towns,” Gannaway said. “We coordinate together and we work together so that everybody is taken care of.”

It was Gannaway’s idea to start the Bridge Project in the aftermath of the 2015 and 2016 flooding in the state, which hit Clendenin particularly hard. While FEMA declared both federal disasters, damage that occurs on private properties can’t be touched by either the federal or state governments.

“There’s a lot of things we can do that the state and the federal government can’t do,” Gannaway said, referencing the 2012 derecho that drilled West Virginia. “A lot of trees fell on top of houses. The state government could clean trees off of roads, but they couldn’t take the trees off of houses. That was very important to have the voluntary agencies that are skilled and able to go in and cut trees off houses, put tarps on houses.”

One of the main VOAD organizations helping with the Bridge Project is the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) Based out of Lititz, Pennsylvania. One of the seven founding members of the National VOAD back in 1970, MDS Executive Director Kevin King said the faith-based organization knows no other way to be.

“I think it’s in our genes. We take the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospels seriously, where Jesus says, ‘Whatever you have done unto the least of these, my brethren and sisters, you’ve done unto me.’ Our churches, our volunteers see this as a way of practicing their faith in a real hands-on, tangible way.”

Being able to show up in-person as volunteers and do hard, physical labor like with the bridges is the most vital thing a VOAD like MDS can do, according to Gannaway. But money matters too, and King says 75% of MDS funding come from their fellow Mennonites, in whatever increments they can get.

“Recently, a 10-year-old child came in here and said they had a lemonade stand and they gave us their 16, 17 dollars from that for disasters,” King said. “And a donor last week called and said, ‘I hear you’re buying a tool trailer for the recent tornadoes. I’d like to contribute $20,000.’ So most of our giving is from our constituents and from our churches.”

The Mennonite Disaster Service was not at Shafer’s home to help build her bridge, but the workers from WV VOAD who were there wore shirts from MDS. Gannaway said that MDS was essential for getting the project kicked off and reaching their goal of a simple and duplicable blueprint.

“What we wanted was something like a cookie cutter project that volunteers can do,” Gannaway said. “We have a design now that is mitigating and raising the bridges up out of the creeks. But it’s in there safe and secure because we use a power drive to drill into bedrock.

“So if those bridges come out, we’re all in trouble.”

That’s really important for Shafer. The 78-year-old woman has lived at the same location for more than 30 years and has watched the creek flood three times. But 2016’s flood was by far the worst, and scattered things all throughout Clendenin.

“I’ve seen stuff wash down this creek that you wouldn’t believe could wash down a creek,” Shafer said. “Baby swimming pools and balls and coolers. I caught one cooler that belonged to a man who lived nearby, and he came down and said, ‘That’s my cooler.’ I said,’ Yeah, I fished it out of the creek with a rake.’  It’s been weird and it’s been a long, hard time, but we’ve made it so far.”

The mold is only adding more complications to Shafer’s already dire health situation. She’s been sick for the past nine years, saying the doctors she’s seen, “don’t know, to this day, what happened to me.”

It’s taken a turn for the worst at times since the flooding. But there’s one thing that Shafer credits for keeping her alive: her great-niece Payton, now 9 years old.

“When I got really sick, this little girl took over me. And if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t be here today,” Shafer said. “I used to get out of bed at 10 o’clock in the morning, lay down there on that couch until about 10 o’clock at night, then go to bed. I didn’t have no energy, I didn’t care whether I ate. I don’t remember what happened and I didn’t care. But now? I’m gonna make it.”

Thanks to her great niece’s uplifting spirit, Shafer’s excited for what will happen with a new bridge that can accommodate major construction equipment. Shafter and Tyler are moving to a temporary house while someone comes in to replace their trailer with a brand new one. She only has one request for her new trailer: raise it as high as they can put it.

“I hope it’s 5 feet in the air,” Shafer said. “Then I won’t never have no more trouble with water.”

And because people like Shafer are still feeling the impact of the floods more than three years after they happened, Gannaway said there’s more work they can continue to do.

“We’re still as busy today as we were then with helping families recover,” Gannaway said. “To see what we had to do with recovery, I think we’ve done a great job. I think we’ve learned a lot that we can take forward.”

And Shafer could not be more grateful.

“I really am glad that they’ve done it for me,” Shafer said. “Now, my mind runs 24 hours a day trying to figure out what to do next.”

News21 reporters Allie Barton, Briana Castañón, Justine Coleman and Isaac Windes contributed to this report.

Alex Simon

Alex Simon is a master’s student at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Simon attended Elon University in North Carolina and received a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism. During his time there, he was the sports editor of the Elon News Network, the student news publication on campus. Simon has also worked as a writer for MLB.com, Baseball America, High Post Hoops and the Burlington (N.C.) Times-News. View his work here.

 

alexsimonsports.com

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But ask Preuss what his favorite animal in his pet shop is, and his answer might surprise you.

“My favorite animal are humans,” Preuss said. “Honestly, if you can’t figure out how to love and care and be compassionate toward humans, you don’t really have a chance with animals.”

Preuss gets to express that love and care every day in his one-of-a-kind animal emporium, with all 25,000 square feet being used in one way or another. Preuss Pets has a quarantine room for animals that arrive there, a breeding room for both fish and birds, a classroom for demonstrations, a school bus and a massive showroom with a mixture of just about everything — birds, reptiles, and hundreds of fish tanks.

On the night of Dec. 22, 2013, an ice storm hammered Michigan’s capital city. The storm’s more than six inches of ice not only knocked out power for more than a week for a significant chunk of the Lansing community, but it also turned Preuss Pets into a shelter.

For Steve Oberg, aquatics manager at Preuss Pets, his family didn’t get power back for nearly two weeks, giving his kids a Christmas unlike any other.

“I distinctly remember the kids opening up Christmas presents at home, under flashlight, at like 5 in the morning,” Oberg said.

But thanks to what Preuss called, “the grace of God,” Preuss Pets was one of the few places in town that didn’t lose power from “the storm of all storms.”

“It was hard for anybody to be prepared enough for that,” Preuss said. “We could have been not helping others but doing everything just to help ourselves at that time, if it hadn’t been for just a bit of luck or coincidence.”

Part of the luck for Preuss was the timing of the storm. Pet shops that sell fish typically don’t get new fish around the Christmas holiday, meaning the dozens of fish tanks in the shop’s quarantine room were empty. When you add the used fish tanks they sell, Preuss Pets had at least 50 fish tanks available and ready to be used.

And that was a good thing, because every one of them was needed. Fish are particularly impacted by power outages, as most aquariums need power to maintain proper water temperature, oxygen levels and filter systems. But the confluence of timing left Preuss Pets prepared to fill every tank with fish seeking refuge.

“We set up all these extra tanks to put people’s fish in, and we age water and filters. Doing some of these things that would [be] very difficult without that,” Oberg said. “It was fairly easy for us to set up that sort of temporary hospital, but it wouldn’t normally be very easy to do.”

Some of the fish that dozens of people brought to Preuss Pets actually stayed for more than a month, allowing owners to make sure their lives were back in order before coming back for their fish. But a constant cycle of fish coming in and out of the store fit right in with the way the store operates daily.

“We run this store every day with a sense of chaos, because there is so much that happens,” Preuss said. “It was mainly trying to plug those animals into that routine.”

While some people would struggle deciding if they would welcome strangers into their home — or, in this case, strange fish into his store — Preuss said it wasn’t a decision at all.

“It’s a reflex … I mean, what is my option? I don’t even see an option. How could you say, ‘No, we can’t?’” Preuss said. “You’ve got to open the doors. In those situations, we always got to pull together.”

Preuss grew up in pet shops thanks to his mother’s fascination with them, helping her run various shops since he was 9. From those experiences, he admits that there is an element of a “bubble” to the pet shop world — where everyone can get along and “geek out” over the animals. But in his eyes, there’s no other way he’d rather be.

“What we’ve created in this store, we’re allowed to feel naturally that these are really cool things,” Preuss said. “We can create these things for people and the people kind of rally around us, and we create this collective energy and everybody’s loving it.

“It’s hard to get outside of that bubble and be in the midst of a cold world. It’s just not natural to us. So yeah, maybe there is a certain degree of optimism and faith and hope that this is just the way it is, and when you go outside that bubble, you realize that it’s not. But it can be.”

And the Lansing community has embraced that, too. Preuss speaks at nearby Michigan State University classes every year, and is even featured as the Waldo in a Lansing-specific “Where’s Waldo?” map. The environment they’ve created at Preuss Pets allows for people to feel like it’s a place they can call home.

“There’s people that will come in that need us,” Preuss said. “Some show up every day, some show up every week, some show up every month, but we’re part of that routine. And you can see that it means something to them.”

But that chaotic routine also means something for the people at the Preuss Pets, too, especially when the community needed it most.

For aquatics manager Oberg, what they were able to do for Lansing not only had a major impact in the reaction to the 2013 ice storm, but has also left a lasting legacy at the pet shop.

“That event not only showed us what we can do for the community, but it also showed us what we needed to have for a facility here to protect our investments, our resources and the fish that we’re responsible for,” Oberg said.

And for Preuss, the moment that still sticks with him more than five years later is the chance to see the impact that saving a fish had on a young girl and her family, and see the purity of why humans are his favorite animals.

“We saved their piranha, and this little 5-year-old was practically weeping in tears and jumping for joy and excited that their piranha was still alive,” Preuss said. “And it’s like, ‘Wow.’ You don’t know how you touch people in that way. Seeing different people and how they were able to reunite with those animals? That’s what made it all worthwhile.”

Alex Simon

Alex Simon is a master’s student at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Simon attended Elon University in North Carolina and received a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism. During his time there, he was the sports editor of the Elon News Network, the student news publication on campus. Simon has also worked as a writer for MLB.com, Baseball America, High Post Hoops and the Burlington (N.C.) Times-News. View his work here.

 

alexsimonsports.com

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