Volunteers armed with chainsaws helped clear trees felled by the Aug. 17 storm, saving three Marengo families tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket tree removal costs.
Lutheran Church Charities Disaster Response volunteers mobilized this week to help the property owners after reading about their plight in the Northwest Herald last Wednesday, said Kathy O’Day, the group’s director.
“This has really become our niche,” O’Day said. “We want to serve, that’s what we want to do, and it’s just one way we can be the hands and feet of Christ. This is our way of doing it – through chainsaws.”
Lutheran Church Charities Disaster Response is a team of volunteers trained to help with the cleanup from natural disasters across the nation, O’Day said. When a few local volunteers heard what happened in Marengo, they immediately wanted to help, she said.
On Aug. 17, a tornado touched down in unincorporated Marengo for about six minutes, wreaking havoc on the properties of three neighbors on Maple Street south of Marengo, according to the residents and the National Weather Service.
All three families reported some damage to their homes and other structures, but most of the expense was going to come from removing the many trees uprooted or blown over by the storm’s 95 mph winds.
One of the homeowners, Kathy Baumann, said she and her husband were devastated to see all of the damage done to their property, which included about 12 fallen or uprooted trees and others with large, hanging branches.
“We just were overwhelmed with thinking how in the world are we going to take care of this because [homeowner’s] insurance doesn’t cover it,” she said.
The couple had to travel out of the state for a few days after the storm but, based on their neighbor’s tree removal estimate, Kathy’s husband, Steve Baumann, said the level of damage on their property likely would have cost them upward of $25,000.
They were still trying to figure out how they would begin to cover the cost when they received a call from O’Day on Saturday offering the services of the disaster response team, Kathy said.
“I just broke out in tears, I couldn’t even speak to her,” she said. “I was just in tears just thinking that something like this could happen to us, how they would just be so willing to help us. It was incredible.”
When they came back home Sunday morning, the volunteers were already hard at work, Kathy said.
O’Day brought a team of 32 Lutheran Early Response Team volunteers – a branch of LCC Disaster Response – to Maple Street on Saturday to start the cleanup on the three properties. Smaller teams of about 18 people came back on Sunday and Monday to finish the work, O’Day said.
The volunteers worked into the evenings Saturday through Monday to clean up the properties, even taking the time to pile brush for burning and to split and stack logs so the homeowners could transport them more easily, Steve Baumann said.
The team brought a Bobcat, a 50-foot boom lift and multiple tractors to the site so that they could remove any safety hazards and move the resulting brush and logs wherever the homeowners wanted, O’Day said.
Steve Baumann plans to contact a few firewood suppliers in the area to see if they will buy the logs so that he can then donate that money back to the LCC Disaster Response team, he said.
“We want them to be able to help more people,” Steve Baumann said. “To have this happen out of the blue where they took care of it all, a hundred percent, for us was truly remarkable.”
Another one of the homeowners, Lisa Mitchell, estimated that there were about 16 trees down when she returned to her family’s property after the storm Aug. 17. She also had no idea what her family would have done if it weren’t for a divine intervention in the form of 30 sweaty, enthusiastic volunteers from across northern Illinois, Mitchell said.
“It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling honestly,” she said. “I can’t even put into words how much relief and just how grateful I feel for everything that’s happened.”
The team also cleaned up the property of Mitchell’s neighbor, Robert Klein, she said. In an interview last week, Klein said he was looking at around $8,500 in tree removal costs.
Mitchell said she and her neighbors felt the support of the entire Marengo community behind them.
Local residents collected donations from Sullivan’s Foods and Walmart to provide snacks and water bottles for the volunteers and a local Subway bought lunch for the whole team, Steve Baumann said.
O’Day’s team is made up of around 300 certified chainsaw operators as well as heavy equipment operators. They work within their network of churches across the region to find people in need, O’Day said. This network includes Zion Lutheran Church in Marengo and St. John’s Lutheran Church in Union.
Since the Aug. 17 storm, the team has worked on about 30 sites across northern Illinois from Kankakee to Yorkville, O’Day said.
Donations to LCC Disaster Response can be made through the Lutheran Church Charities website.
