Over the weekend, teams from southeast Texas, Amarillo, and Collin County traveled to Boulder County, Colorado to help families whose homes were destroyed in the Marshall Fire. The teams are comprised of both male and female volunteers with the Texas Baptist Men (TBM), which is headquartered in Dallas.
Late in December of 2021, the Marshall wildfire burned across approximately six-thousand acres and devastated around 1,100 houses in Boulder County, Colorado. Texas Baptist Men shared that there was $500 million dollars’ worth of damage done to the area by the time it the fire was extinguished.
Upon the teams’ arrival in Boulder, they received around four-hundred requests from people looking for help.
Texas Baptist Men’s Director of Disaster Relief David Wells explained the volunteers are working with families by going through the debris where their homes once stood to see if any items can be recovered and saved.
“They’re going in with homeowners. Homeowners are identifying areas of their home that they believe they have valuables in, and then our teams are going in and sifting through the ash to find those valuables for them,” Wells said.
“So many of the items that are special to us are small like jewelry and silver,” he continued. “Other items with sentimental meaning may be guns that have been handed down from one generation to another. These teams will take the time to sift through piles of ash to help families recover treasures they thought were lost forever.”
Wells also added, “When we give the items to the families, it reminds them that not all is lost. It encourages them. It reminds them that people care about them. It helps them push forward.”
The website for Texas Baptist Men states that their disaster relief program has been taking care of Texas when natural disasters strike since 1967.
The organization also assisted after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, the Southeast Asia tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. “Through a diverse array of ministries, TBM has provided the calm after the storm for millions,” the organization shared.
Wells expressed on TBM and talking about helping the families who lost so much during the wildfire in Boulder County.
Wells expressed, “We can offer a shoulder to cry on. We can offer a physical hand to pick up whatever debris we need to pick up and do whatever we can and to pray with them and then to offer them eternal hope is our thing that we can offer people.”