Palo
Community Rallies Against Flood Waters
Like many other residents in the Palo community, Ryan
Scheckel never thought the water would reach his home.
“I saw them sandbagging the supermarket and
thought, ‘what in the world are they doing?
The water is never going to get that high,’”
says Scheckel, the head coach for men’s and
women’s track and field and cross country.
Scheckel,
whose house is located in the area farthest west of
the river, immediately began to move a few items off
his basement floor, placing some things on shelves
and tables. He and his wife, Jill Larsen Scheckel
’01 assumed the water would not reach that high
if his home flooded. Sandbagging had already begun
in Palo, and Scheckel was quick to lend a hand, working
alongside other volunteers to cover manholes and other
key areas of the city.
The
water, though, kept rising – as did the predictions
of how high it was going to get. Scheckel and others
spent hours sandbagging houses and other areas, only
to be told that the new predictions declared all their
efforts to be futile. “We learned that all those
sandbags we placed probably weren’t even going
to slow the water down,” says Scheckel.
It
was then that Scheckel decided to remove everything
he could out of his basement, which in the end enabled
his family to salvage many of their possessions. The
Scheckels ended up losing their water heater, furnace
and carpet, along with a few other items to the dirty
flood waters. In the end, the water came up to four
feet in the basement. Scheckel, known on campus for
his positive attitude, is confident his family will
start again. “It’s just a setback,”
he says optimistically.
For
Scheckel, the most difficult part of the ordeal was
the mandatory evacuation decreed in Palo. “That
was hard,” says Scheckel. “We had to leave
our home, not knowing what would happen to it.”
Uncertainty seemed to be everywhere. Scheckel noticed
that even the firefighters who stayed behind were
unsure just exactly what they would be up against.
Through
it all, Scheckel agrees that the community came together
when it mattered most. “When you all go through
something like that together you really get to know
one another,” he says. Scheckel says he knows
his neighbors on a deeper level now. “They’re
more than names now,” he says, “Now we
really know each other. Everyone really pulled together.”
During
the crises Scheckel found support in his family as
well as the Mount Mercy community. He and his family
were able to stay with his wife’s parents and
several alumni and current students helped Scheckel
and his family move boxes and other items. “I
don’t know what we’d have done without
our family and Mount Mercy,” he says.
The
devastation that Scheckel witnessed in the Palo community
has given him a deeper sense of empathy for other
communities that have gone through similar circumstances,
such as the tornado disaster at Parkersburg. “I
guess you always have compassion, but now you have
understanding,” he says.
Despite
everything that happened, Scheckel feels very fortunate
to still have a house that he and his family can live
in, pointing out that many other families have much
harder circumstances to overcome than the one his
family is facing. “Out of many in the community
we are one of the most fortunate,” says Scheckel.
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