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December 16, 2007

Cleanup draws 200

By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

It was about 9:30 a.m. Sunday when Ryan McCoy heard his name on the roll call.

McCoy, 27, is an information technologies technician by trade, so he doesn’t earn his living with a chain saw or work with trees by profession. He grew up in Joplin and now lives north of Webb City.

His background in volunteer work is sporadic, consisting of “little things here and there,” he said.

But he was among dozens of volunteers — both novice and veteran, from inside and outside Joplin — who fanned out through the city streets Sunday to help remove debris left by last week’s ice storm.

City officials said about 200 people showed up for the work day.

“I saw the bulletin on TV, and I figured we could help out,” said McCoy, who was without power for about six days.

McCoy said he volunteered for the cleanup chiefly because of the scale of the storm.

“I know there are a lot of places that have it a lot worse than we have,” he said.

The cleanup effort was mounted by Joplin officials in conjunction with AmeriCorps’ St. Louis Emergency Response Team. AmeriCorps is a national network of hundreds of programs that sometimes is likened to a domestic Peace Corps.

The work Sunday unfolded in two phases, said Evan Snyder, one of the five AmeriCorps representatives who were on hand to help coordinate the cleanup in Joplin.

Utilizing Memorial Hall as a base of operations, teams of about 10 volunteers each first went to residences whose owners already had called in and requested help cutting up and removing downed or dangling tree limbs and other debris from their yards.

Snyder said about 200 of those requests, which were collected via a call center, were already queued up for volunteers Sunday morning.

Once those calls were answered, volunteers started going door-to-door and, upon securing waivers from the homeowners, helped clean up those properties. The work included cutting down limbs, cutting limbs into lengths of 8 feet or less and stacking the debris on the curb.

David Hertzberg, Joplin’s public works director, said the city later will have contract crews travel through the streets to collect the stacked limbs in a program similar to its annual leaf-pickup effort.

“This is phase one,” he said of Sunday’s cleanup.

As for what the city will do with the debris once it is collected, Hertzberg said officials are weighing the options.

For AmeriCorps, the plan is to help the city establish the framework for what could be a sustained volunteer cleanup effort, Snyder said. A local organization would lead the campaign.

“We are trying to set up the infrastructure,” Snyder said.

Most of the volunteers arrived Sunday morning at Memorial Hall with their own equipment, including chain saws.

One of those volunteers was Jay St. Clair, who led a contingent from College Heights Christian Church.

The church has helped with other cleanup and housing rehabilitation projects in the past, St. Clair said, and it sees volunteer work as part of its mission.

“We just really believe that God has put us here to meet people’s needs,” he said. “Jesus would be out there today with a chain saw.”

St. Clair and his team headed out to a home near 16th Street and Indiana Avenue. As some used chain saws to cut down mangled branches and limbs still dangling from trees, others trooped back and forth carrying debris to the curb.

After 10:30 a.m., the group had finished its work and had a heap of limbs more than 6 feet tall ready for pickup.

Then, it was on to the next house.

Butch Haslip, of Carthage, was one of five workers from Cycle Connection who volunteered to help and who worked on St. Clair’s team.

For him, the reason to be out was simple.

“They need help, and we can do it,” he said.

He then cited a quote from the Bible: “The Lord said, ‘Who should I send?’ And I said, ‘Send me.’”





‘Nutcracker’



Memorial Hall was used as a staging ground for Sunday’s cleanup effort, but city officials said tonight’s scheduled performance of “The Great Russian Nutcracker” at Memorial Hall will go on.

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