These Kansas heroes dropped everything to help others

Wanda Rowe still reflects on the woman who had been living in the rubble of her house in the mountains of Puerto Rico for a month before help arrived, saved from Hurricane Maria by the bed that was now her shelter.

The debris piled taller than two-story houses is what Jerry Snively remembers most about his time in the Florida Keys.

Dana Denton can’t shake the “semi-ordered chaos” that greeted her when she arrived in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and stunned residents who could fit all that they had left in the world in a single garbage bag.

Though they served in different areas, these everyday Kansas heroes have something in common: moved by the devastation they saw in the aftermath of hurricanes this summer, they each signed up to be relief volunteers for the Red Cross — and their first deployments changed their lives.

“I wouldn’t say I was a hero at all,” said Denton, who lives in Medicine Lodge. “I was just doing what I needed to do, what we all needed to do.”

On this Thanksgiving Day, they’re grateful for the opportunity to help others who are suffering — and they’re eager to do it again.

“It solidified what I want to to do the rest of my life,” Denton said. “It was amazing.”

Dana Denton in Texas

Stunned by the images of the widespread damage Hurricane Harvey caused in Texas, Denton signed up to volunteer for the Red Cross and took the training class.

Within days, the Red Cross called and asked if she could go to Texas the next day for a couple of weeks. She didn’t think it was possible.

“I couldn’t take two weeks off with no pay,” she said.

But she was able to get the time off from work, and her church gave her the equivalent of two weeks of wages. She left for Texas two days after getting the call and eventually ended up at The Forge for Families, a church-run community center in Houston’s Third Ward, long considered the center of the city’s African-American community.

Denton and the other six volunteers on her Red Cross team found a shelter struggling to function.

“They all had the right mission in their heart,” Denton said. “They were just trying to help out their neighbors, shelter and feed them.”

But the shelter was “semi-ordered chaos,” she said, because no one had experience dealing with a disaster of Harvey’s magnitude.

Even the Red Cross struggled to get the basics to the shelter, where Denton served primarily as a cook.

“We really were not getting any of the food we should have gotten to feed the clients,” she said. “It was a challenge.”

At one point, supplies ran so low that all Denton had to offer the 50 or so people staying there was frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

The water had receded quite a bit by the time Denton and her team arrived in Houston, but there were still signs of how bad it had been.

“Bridges we would go over, they were 30 feet high and there was flood sludge on the bridges, so you knew the water was that high at one time,” she said.

Driving through neighborhoods, they would pass piles of flood-damaged items stacked up next to the street for removal. The piles would be 30 feet long and 20 feet high, she said.

“It was heartbreaking, really,” she said. “You would go down the neighborhoods and everything these people owned and had was piled up in the front yard.”

At the shelter where the Red Cross team slept, a 50-year-old woman who lost her home in the flood committed suicide while Denton was there.

“That’s how real this was,” she said. “It was very eye-opening, very humbling.”

After running The Forge for a week, the Red Cross team was relocated to La Marque on the Gulf Coast near Galveston. There were New York firefighters and Army soldiers there to help distribute supplies to residents.

“Nobody knew how to run a fork lift,” Denton said. “I ran one 30 years ago and thought, ‘This is like riding a bike.’”

She’s all of 110 pounds and wears a size 2 dress, so people got a kick out of such a small person driving such a big vehicle.

“They would laugh and take pictures,” she said. “I didn’t care. I was there to do one thing and that was to take care of those people.”

Jerry Snively in Florida

The damage Harvey did in Texas also inspired Wichita retiree Snively to volunteer. The Red Cross sent him to Florida in late September to help with the recovery from Hurricane Irma, which is blamed for more than 80 deaths in the state and overall damage estimated to be at least $50 billion.

When organizers in Florida discovered Snively had been a UPS driver, he was put behind the wheel of a truck carrying generators from Orlando to Atlanta for shipment to Puerto Rico, which had been struck by both Irma and Hurricane Maria.

He then drove a large truck down to the Florida Keys, where he helped set up a distribution center. His team slept in a tent city, because so few buildings still standing in the Keys were inhabitable.

“It was pretty sweltering in those tents,” Snively said.

For a 66-year-old man, “it was a challenge sleeping on a cot in a tent in Florida,” he said.

But he didn’t complain. Not after seeing what the hurricane had done.

Snively found himself at the gate to the distribution center, making lists of what residents needed as they arrived.

“We were handing out tarps and shovels and rakes and water,” he said. “One woman started crying and said ‘I don’t even have a house to put a tarp on.’”

Another woman “looked at me and just started bawling,” Snively said. “She said, ‘I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to be helping people and I don’t even know what I need to help myself.’”

When he thinks of heroes, Snively said, he thinks about the 13-year-old girl who had been to the distribution center the day before with her mother to pick up supplies needed to clean up around their house.

The mother returned the next day with a gift.

“‘My daughter wanted to make cookies for you because you were out in the heat all day,’” the woman told Snively.

To him, the woman who made trip after trip to the distribution center for neighbors who had no way to get needed items was a hero. She was helping those who couldn’t help themselves.

Snively spent two weeks in Florida, most of it in the Keys.

“The thing that was hardest was seeing all those big, huge piles of home debris,” he said.

He had helped with the clean-up in Haysville after the tornado struck in 1999, he said, but Hurricane Irma was different. Sand blown in from the beaches was piled in drifts 3 and 4 feet high on the sides of the road.

Trees were stripped of all their foliage. Mattresses were stacked in a pile as tall as a two-story house. Another pile was nothing but appliances.

“It was a real eye opener on what kind of devastation Mother Nature can do,” Snively said. “It was just house after house and mile after mile of debris.”

Wanda Rowe in Puerto Rico

As she watched coverage of the hurricanes in Texas and Florida, Rowe felt helpless. There was nothing she could do to help.

“I thought, ‘I don’t want to feel like this again. I want to be able to help if this happens again,’” Rowe said.

She signed up. Three days later, the Red Cross called.

She speaks fluent Spanish, a skill needed among volunteers in Puerto Rico. Her employer gave her the time off. With no training, she spent three weeks there, returning early this month.

Rowe has fond memories of summers spent in Puerto Rico with her grandparents. She had taken a group of students from Trinity Academy to the island in March and returned in July with her husband.

“The Puerto Rico I saw when I landed was not the same,” she said. “It was unrecognizable. It was heartbreaking to see the devastation.”

Few locations had electricity. Maria devastated the island’s electric grid, which Rowe said was patchwork in places in the best of circumstances.

She was assigned to a team that drove emergency supplies to towns all over the island, including remote areas in the mountains. Maria didn’t just block roads with debris, it washed roads away entirely.

“We were able to get to every single town that they sent us to,” she said. “It was a miracle many times. We would get there by someone showing up when we were stopped where the road was gone and they would say, ‘I can show you a different way.’ It would take a lot longer, but we were able to get there.”

She’s haunted and inspired by what it was like to bring supplies to towns that hadn’t had food or drinkable water for as long as three weeks.

“Nothing prepares you for that,” Rowe said. “That was very difficult. You were the first people that are bringing help. There’s lots of hugs, lots of tears.”

The road into one mountain town was so damaged the truck couldn’t continue, so they walked from house to house to see what the people needed. Rowe spotted an 83-year-old woman on the roof of a house, trying to repair the damage.

Her husband couldn’t do it because he was in a wheelchair, struggling with Parkinson’s and Alzheimers, she told Rowe.

“I just remember hugging her when she came down,” Rowe said. “She just held onto me and cried. This was the home they had built together.”

Rowe said she’s still processing everything she saw and experienced in Puerto Rico. She was excited to hear that the Red Cross now has nearly 50 large trucks delivering emergency supplies where needed. That’s about double the number delivering when she was there.

‘So much joy’

One memory she’ll cherish, Rowe said, was the resilience shown by Puerto Ricans.

“Their spirit is high,” she said. “There’s so much joy...they’re such giving people.”

When she found Marisol, the woman who had been living in the rubble of her mountain house for a month, “there were mosquitoes everywhere,” Rowe said. “Mosquitoes were biting her and were biting us. She offered us her mosquito spray.

“She’s the one living under the rubble of her home, under her bed, and she’s wanting to help us.”

Denton found reason for hope in the midst of desperate times as well.

As floodwaters ravaged Houston and the Texas coast, people dropped what they were doing to help with rescues. That sense of community carried on in the aftermath.

“Everyone came together...every single age,” she said. “It didn’t matter who you were. It didn’t matter your race. It didn’t matter where you were from. Everyone came together and helped.

“It was a complete turnaround from what we had seen so much of” before the hurricanes, Denton said.

“It gives me hope.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 2:09 PM with the headline "These Kansas heroes dropped everything to help others."