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Harvey Update #24

Bob’s Harvey Update #24
September 3, 2017 2200

Executive summary: the Sunday School building is way worse than we imagined.

Praise God for the many people who devoted themselves today to helping others through this drawn-out crisis. I’m particularly thankful for the team from San Antonio. Some of them worked on some houses in League City, but several of them stayed behind and worked on our Sunday School building

The bad news is, there is a lot more moisture in the walls than we feared. We knew we needed to examine the outside walls where the water had come in, and we found very damp sheet rock, wet insulation and quite a few places where the 2×4’s were rotted away or destroyed by termites. This led to a decision to gut the outside walls to two feet. But late in the day Kevin Watterson, from the EFCA Crisis Response organization, took a look at the inside walls using a moisture meter, and found that they too are wet. In fact the whole building needs to be gutted to 4 feet. This will be a major task and will entail major reconstruction efforts.

It’s discouraging, but in all honesty, I look forward to seeing how the Lord provides.

In other news, we expect the pace of helping people to begin to back off tomorrow. On the one hand, many people are going back to work and school, so our pool of helpers will be diminished. On the other hand, many of the houses in our area are now fully gutted. The next places we can help are with mold control, and eventually with reconstruction.