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.