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BUCKHANNON – Weaverland Disaster Services has been in Upshur County for weeks, helping people clean up after the July 21 flooding, and the group intends to stay all winter to help the community rebuild.
Rufus Zimmerman with Weaverland Disaster Services said it is a church-affiliated program started 20 years ago in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“We do cleanup for floods, tornadoes, any kind of storm damage, and then we also do rebuilding. We do total rebuilds, we do remodeling, we pretty much do whatever the need is,” Zimmerman said. “For the last four winters, we were in Kentucky. Last winter, we built 10 new homes.”
About 15 members from Weaverland Disaster Services are in the Upshur County area right now.
“In the last two years, we built more houses than ever before,” Zimmerman said. “We did more repair remodeling in previous years. We were in New Orleans after Katrina hit for about 10 years in a row, and then we left there and went all across Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi — kind of all over.”
The Mennonite volunteer group partners with the Fuller Center Disaster ReBuilders to coordinate their builds and help as many people as possible.
“We’re planning on teaming up with them once the rebuild starts,” Zimmerman said. “Last year, we had up to 30 volunteers from November to March. Every week we had a bunch of people, and we are looking at doing the same thing this year. We have to wait until the houses have dried out to start all the rebuilds.”
Zimmerman said they also must wait for funds to be allocated to families before any work can be done.
“We primarily work for people who don’t have insurance. The homeowners I’ve been in contact with down here had trouble affording flood insurance,” Zimmerman said. “We plan to come back in November and then work all winter long until about the end of March.”
Their program in the summer months typically consists of disaster cleanup.
“We volunteer our time. If there’s a group that has the funding, then we put our time in,” Zimmerman said. “Over the years, we’ve done a fair amount of rebuilds.”
