I talked to a woman at the Conklin Presbyterian Church (607-775-0365),
who referred me to their dispatcher in another part of the building. She
is Carol Fuller, cell # 607-240-8222. She said that their area was one of
the worst hit (as we observed) and that help in cleaning out basements,
etc would be needed for quite a while.

I asked her whether people from this far away should call her before
coming, and she said no, just come. Generally homeowners don't like to
have helpers come TOO early. Starting at 10:00 or 11 is generally good.
Come to the church to be sent out. I neglected to ask what to bring, but 
I'd guess
boots, work gloves and shovels would be about it. (I'd still want to call
ahead if I were going to go again.)

Certainly it would be a lot more efficient from here to go directly there
than to go to Salvation Army and then likely be sent out in that
direction.

Martha

Martha Ferger, Cris McConkey, and Marsha Kardon from the Ithaca Unitarian Church are among the volunteers pictured above.

On July 10, 2006, the three of us left for Binghamton where we were assigned to locations by the Salvation Army. The first location was a house in Endwell belonging to a retired couple. The first floor had been flooded with two feet of water and the basement with five feet. We helped move furniture from the first floor into storage in the garage to make ready for repartations, then removed wet paneling from the basement to the street. The second location was near Kirkwood. The Salvation Army got a call from a pregnant woman who needed help pulling her belonging out of a storage locker. As you can see from the pictures, the facility was pretty much trashed. But, we were able to save some of her possessions. We shovelled out two inches of mud from an empty storage locker for a place to her possessions that were salvagable.

On the way home, we passed through Kirkwood. It was hit hard. We past a row of houses all pretty badly flooded and then came to the ballfield and community recreation area. There was dried mud way up the poles for the basketball hoops and up the sides of the bleechers. On the other side of the road was an historic covered bridge that looked not too damaged still on its foundation, but with all vegetation gone, replaced by piles of river gravel that bulldozers had strated to move around. If there was still a road to this bridge, we didn't see it.

Hi.

My name is Cris and I've started this blog primarily as a place where folks in the Ithaca area can go to to coordinate day trips to nearby areas that have been flooded for cleanup brigade work, to find out what agencies and churches are coordinating cleanup efforts, and as a place we can all share experiences, photos, and useful information.

Cris McConkey
Ithaca Unitarian Social Justice Council