By Jeff Brumley
Andy Jones says he has just one answer for church groups still looking for that quick spring or early summer mission: come to Augusta, Ga.
As the minister of missions at First Baptist Church there, Jones has been overseeing the recovery and cleanup work in the month since a winter ice storm blew through the Southeast.
In Augusta and the surrounding area, the mid-February storm left fallen trees, damaged homes and hundreds without power for up to two weeks.
A First Baptist volunteer force got to work the day after Winter Storm Pax departed the area.
“We have been going at this since the Friday after the storm,” Jones told ABPnews/Herald. “We attacked the structural things first — limbs on houses, patching holes in ceilings, putting tarps on roofs.”
But there is still a lot to do. Two other disaster-relief organizations recently left Augusta, bequeathing nearly 100 names of residents still in need of help. That’s on top of a list of 30 the church still has yet to get to, Jones said.
With a volunteer force of around 55 from the congregation, that means a lot of outside help is needed mostly for debris removal and clearing limbs from yards in a two-county area.
Two Cooperative Baptist Fellowship groups — one from South Carolina, another from Georgia — recently visited to help. But more are needed.
“If I could get some more groups like that, I could get this thing knocked out and done,” he said.
Tommy Deal, CBF national disaster response coordinator, issued a call for help on the Fellowship’s disaster Facebook page Monday. He is headed to Augusta on Sunday.
“I’m just going to encourage them and thank them,” Deal said.
Churches and individuals interested in helping may contact Jones by email at ajones@fbcaugusta.org, or by calling him at 706.306.3015.