Ongoing Michigan Flood Disaster not Hidden from CWS, Local Recovery Community


Carol Fouke-Mpoyo | December 22, 2014

Chad and Denise Flinders of Warren, Mich., with their six children - all adopted and five with special needs. The August 11, 2014, torrential downpour sent rainwater down through the roof, and sewer water spewing up through the basement toilet and drains, causing extensive damage. Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo for CWS

Chad and Denise Flinders of Warren, Mich., with their six children – all adopted and five with special needs. The August 11, 2014, torrential downpour sent rainwater down through the roof, and sewer water spewing up through the basement toilet and drains, causing extensive damage. Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo for CWS

DETROIT — Southeast Michigan’s Aug. 11 flood disaster affected more people than any other U.S. disaster in 2014.  Apart from a few hundred households still carrying sodden, ruined belongings to the curb, the disaster’s impact is no longer visible from the street.

But Church World Service and the emerging local long-term recovery group CWS helped train on Dec. 16 know that the disaster continues inside tens of thousands of people’s homes and hearts.

CWS offers training, start-up grants and ongoing mentoring to local long-term recovery groups like that in southeast Michigan.  These local groups seek to identify disaster survivors who are having a hard time recovering and to mobilize money, materials and volunteers to supplement government recovery programs and survivors’ own resources.

The local long-term recovery groups extend help to homes and hearts like Denise and Chad Flinders’ and Edith Leposki’s.

Denise and her husband, Chad, share their 1,000-foot Warren, Mich., ranch home with six adopted children, five of them with special needs.

Denise worked in title insurance and real estate before choosing to be a stay-at-home mom.  Chad worked in customer service for an investment company for 20 years before debilitating arthritis forced him to go on disability.

Two of their children, Carter, 11, and Mackenzie, 10, each had a bedroom in their finished basement.  Brook, 13, who suffers from emotional upsets and insomnia, had her own first-floor bedroom.  Chad, Denise and their three other daughters were distributed among the other two first-floor bedrooms and the living room couch.

“I’ve lived on this street my whole life, and the Red Run relief drain forty feet behind our house had never overflowed,” Denise said.

She recounted how, on August 11, “it started raining, and it rained, and it rained.  I’d never seen anything like it.  I was scared to death.  Water poured into our yard at a very fast pace.  I thought our house was going to be sucked into Red Run.  I could see eight cars floating.”

The family huddled together on the first floor.  After a fitful night’s sleep, they peered into the basement and saw the water.

“It was very smelly,” Denise said.  “I knew there was raw sewage in it.  We got just over two feet of water – just enough to ruin everything!  Finally it drained down and left everything sopping wet.”

Volunteers from the Presbytery of Detroit’s Hands-On Mission and two other work groups helped the Flinders empty out the basement, tear out the ruined sheetrock and apply pre-emptive treatment against mold.

“Carter and Mackenzie lost their bedrooms along with all their books, clothes and toys,” Denise said.  The whole family’s winter clothes were ruined, as were the washing machine, refrigerator and stand-up freezer.

Denise said homeowners insurance covered repairs to first-floor damage resulting from water that came down through the roof, but did not cover any basement repairs because they lacked a “sewer backup rider, which isn’t expensive but I didn’t even know about it and would have purchased it long ago if I had.”

She added, “We are hoping to rebuild.”  The question is when and how.

Meanwhile, Carter said he still feels “sad” four months later.  He’s squeezed into a small bedroom with his sister Alyssa, 11.  Brook is now sharing her small bedroom with Mackenzie and Grace, 7, who as a result aren’t getting much sleep.  Neither are Denise or Chad.

“It’s nearly impossible to get Brook settled down,” Denise said.  “Sometimes she doesn’t sleep at night.  We know we can’t recover everything we lost, but a good night’s sleep would be amazing.  Some kind of bedroom for Brook would be a wonderful ‘new normal.’”

Edith Leposki, 87, of Warren, Mich., whose basement was flooded up to the third step from the bottom on August 11. In November, as she was replacing some shelf paper in the basement pantry, she passed out, fell and broke bones in her arm and face. She spent five weeks in a rehabilitation center before returning home Dec. 15. Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo for CWS

Edith Leposki, 87, of Warren, Mich., whose basement was flooded up to the third step from the bottom on August 11. In November, as she was replacing some shelf paper in the basement pantry, she passed out, fell and broke bones in her arm and face. She spent five weeks in a rehabilitation center before returning home Dec. 15. Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo for CWS

For her part, Edith Leposki noticed it was raining especially hard that evening of August 11.

She was watching television when she “heard a screeching noise” in the basement.  She went to investigate, and from the top of the landing saw water gushing out of the toilet and “my things floating.”

“Stinky, black, greasy” sewer water also poured out of the floor drains.  The water level quickly rose to the third step from the bottom.  The screeching turned out to be from the clothes dryer’s motor as it got wet.

“It was too late to do any saving,” said Edith, who is 87.  Among cherished belongings lost: an antique record player her husband had refinished.

She was able to hire a basement cleanout, and then got a local contractor to install a supplementary drainage system.  The workers unplugged her freezer, resulting in the loss of all its contents.

They jack-hammered a wide trough around the basement’s perimeter, laid the pipe and refilled the trough with rough cement, making it impossible to retile.  Later, Edith’s son got Home Depot in to lay carpet.

Then, on Nov. 7, while she was replacing shelf paper in the basement pantry, Edith passed out and fell, breaking bones in her left arm and face.  When she woke up, there was blood everywhere and a paramedic was putting the 18th stitch in her face.  She spent several days in the hospital and five weeks in a rehabilitation center before returning home Dec. 15.

A former bank teller and still-active member at Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church, which hosted the CWS training and is just across the street from her home, Edith concluded that apart from losing her husband, the August 11 flash flooding was “the worst, most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me.  It’s been just a nightmare.  Something like this really takes your spirit.”

See related story: CWS training provides expertise, hope to southeast Michigan flood recovery