Sandbag Central

Concordia cancelled classes for Monday and Tuesday, so we went out volunteering all day today. We started out with breakfast at 10:00 a.m. James and I quickly realized we'd be needing gloves and bandanas so we went to Walgreens to get supplies for the group. By the time we made it back to campus, we had thirteen more friends coming with. We headed over to Park Region, where Concordia was shuttling students to Sandbag Central at MSUM. There, we registered with FEMA and got in line for the city busses to take us to sites. Over five hundred students were waiting in line with us, so we weren't actually able to make it to a site until noon.

Once we arrived at our first site (a grocery store parking lot), we started making sandbags and loading them into trucks to deliver to houses. Our system was great by the end - we had sixty people, so it took a while to get the groove. However, we had all sorts of lines to pass the sandbags along, knew just how many shovelfuls of sand we needed in each bag, etc. We filled countless trucks, it was crazy.

One family came and asked if some of us could come help build a dike behind their house. My group of friends (we called ourselves Team Evap, hoping the water would evaporate) piled into the back of the family's pickup and headed out. We drove a few minutes, and arrived at a house a several blocks from the river. However, the river was literally in their backyard. They were racing to finish the dike before tonight - when the water was expected to hit their house.

Before we started, we figured we'd head to the backyard and come up with a plan. We walked about five feet into the yard and realized no grass was left. We were already ankle deep in mud and the ground was sloping downwards. We all slid down the hill toward the river and laughed about how quickly we had gotten dirty.

Anyway, we had to build a wall out of plywood and then line the entire wall ten feet tall with sandbags. Volunteers from our previous site delivered probably twenty pickups of sandbags, which we stacked and stacked and stacked. Our family was super nice - the grandma brought us all kinds of food! Mostly cookies, fruit, and hamburgers (okay, maybe not best for the vegetarian, but it's the thought that counts!).

After six hours, about half of us just gave in. We were shaking and starting to drop bags because we were so exhausted. The granny gave us a ride back to campus and we're all presumably crashing in our dorms right now.

I think tonight I'm going to head over to MSUM and ask if there's anything I can do to help that doesn't involve heavy lifting. Those sandbags are 30+ pounds each - a little ridiculous!

Anyway, I volunteered to do all of my friends' laundry, so I'd best head out and do that. Oh dear!

Above, I posted a couple pictures from yesterday. I'll try to keep uploading them as they come. Pretty scary that the flood level is so terrible today and the crest is still four days away!