![]() It was extremely gratifying to me as a bishop to hear not ‘What do you want me to do?’ but ‘This is what I’ve done.’” Mobilizing after a Disaster “There wasn’t a phone call saying, ‘Let’s get a work project together.’ It was everyone in the ward understanding that we needed to take care of each other. “You can’t plan those things,” Bishop Hoffman said. Bishop Hoffman reported that people in the ward told him about times they needed a particular kind of help, only to have a fellow ward member arrive with exactly what they needed when they needed it. In instances when members were OK and available to help, they joined the assessment efforts and fanned out from there throughout the ward boundaries.Īs members of the ward followed the emergency plan of helping each other and their neighbors, they saw miracles happen. They split into smaller groups and went to ward members’ homes one by one, assessing needs and helping where they could. “It was hard to determine where to start,” Bishop Hoffman said, but the group relied on the Spirit in deciding where to go first. The next morning, several men from the ward met at a central spot in town to begin checking on ward members. In a situation of this magnitude, Bishop Hoffman said, “You recognize very quickly how reliant you are on Heavenly Father for answers, because you need them, and you need them quick. In the instances where those methods failed, they turned to prayer. Even so, he and ward leaders tried to collect what information they could that night via sporadic phone calls and text messages. When Bishop Chris Hoffman of the Joplin First Ward first heard on that Sunday evening that a storm was coming, he never anticipated how serious the situation would be.Īfter the tornado, he said, “As we realized that things were a lot worse than we thought they might be, we started to try to establish communication.” But those efforts were frustrated by phone outages. ![]() It would become the Church’s command center and provide an ideal camping place for the hundreds of Mormon Helping Hands volunteers who came in from surrounding stakes each weekend for the next several months to help with cleanup efforts. Jim and Virginia Snodgrass, owners of a decorative concrete business in Joplin, offered to share with the stake not only their office and warehouse space but also the acreage surrounding it. There was nowhere to hold disaster relief meetings until a solution was presented by some business owners who were not members of the Church. It’s there that Church headquarters can ship supplies, that volunteers can meet and receive assignments, and that members of the Church and the community in general can find temporary shelter if needed.īut the Joplin Missouri Stake Center, which was at the heart of the area where the tornado touched down, had been destroyed. Normally, relief efforts are coordinated from the stake center, which acts as a command center.
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