DAYTON, Ohio — As ongoing flooding devastates communities across eastern Kentucky, groups across Ohio are looking to provide help however they can.
For the Churches of Christ Disaster Response Team, that usually means sending trailer after trailer of food, clothes, building equipment, generators and volunteers to help communities start to clean up and rebuild. Due to the ongoing emergency, though, Laura Cremeans, the group’s executive director, said the response team has had to adjust their approach.
The group is hoping to make its first trip to Kentucky early next week, bringing a trailer full of emergency supplies, medical equipment and hundreds of bottles of water.
“That’s what they need right now,” Cremeans said.
She’s been in touch with a clinic in Fleming-Neon, to determine the most urgent local needs and the people in the community best equipped to help.
“Right now, it is washed out roads and bridges so that is a real challenge getting to the houses and helping them rebuild,” she said.
That infrastructure is also making it difficult for Cremeans to deploy volunteers the way she’s managed in years past.
“Normally, we would set up a relief effort in one centralized location, but because this is so spread out, we’re not able to do that,” she said.
For right now, she believes the best way southwest Ohio can help is to provide equipment or monetary donations to groups like hers. Churches for Christ DRT has connected with a few Ohio clinics to get some of the medical supplies they need and Cremeans is asking locals to drop off bottles of water to the organization’s thrift store, Reclaimed, off of Needmore Road, or their warehouse in Tipp City.
Cremeans works in Reclaimed, the organization’s thrift store.
Once the group drops off its donations, Cremeans said she will work with locals to determine when and how they would like to see volunteers deployed to help with cleanup and rebuild.
“We knew that we would be needed,” she said.
Cremeans and her husband founded Churches for Christ DRT in 2004, after years of volunteer work in disaster relief and experience in construction and remodeling. The group’s responded to disasters across the country including the Dayton tornadoes in 2019, Hurricane Ida, and recently the tornado outbreak in Western Kentucky.
