• Karl Brady

Your Service Allows Us to Be There When the Community Needs Us the Most

DILLON, SC (September 21, 2018) – As you drive into this bucolic town, the local Shriner’s Club has water up to the roofline.  Without the water, you can imagine the community social gatherings that go on when times aren’t so tough.  Further down the road, houses scattered along the road have water up to the windowsills, where smiling family photos used to provide reminders of days gone by.  Closer into town on the street going towards the Dillon County Emergency Operations Center, local residents have started their recovery and are throwing out belongings that were destroyed when their homes got flooded because of Hurricane Florence.  This scene stuck out to Melissa Cline, a Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services volunteer from Salisbury, NC, who remarked,

“We rode through Dillon and saw people at their homes trying to salvage whatever they could. This broke my heart as I saw all their belongings ruined by water just piled up in their yards. I know some of this is just material things but some of it is their lives they worked so hard for and now they have to start over. I want to go there and be some kind of service for them, even if it’s just to give a meal or a shoulder to cry on.”

It’s a sad irony that a town so close to The Salvation Army’s Emergency Disaster Services staging site in Florence, SC has lost so much to a storm that bears the same name.

Having just arrived from The Salvation Army’s staging site in Florence, The Salvation Army Captain Karl Dahlin was setting up to serve lunch to the one hundred emergency operations professionals serving to keep this community safe and help it recover from Hurricane Florence.  “They’ve been running 12 hour shifts here since before the storm reached this area,” Captain Dahlin said.  “We’ve been trying to make sure that these first responders don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from and can focus on making sure people are safe.”

Travis Glatki, Public Information Officer for the Pee Dee Regional Incident Management Team, agreed.  “Thank you for assisting us during these stressful and dangerous times throughout the Hurricane Florence Response and Recovery Process.  Your encouragement means a lot, and it allows for us to continue working during the time when our community needs us the most.