Storm damage brings FFA, baseball team to the rescue

SENECA, Ill. — Jeff Maierhofer, Seneca High School FFA adviser and ag teacher, expected to get a couple of responses when he sent out the text to his FFA students and members of his son’s 15U baseball team, the Illinois Irish.

The night before, July 12, a storm had dumped almost a half foot of rain on the Seneca area, causing flash flooding that caused a bridge to collapse.

The flash flooding also caused storage sheds behind a row of houses to be swept off their foundations, diverting floodwaters into the basements of houses along 29th Road.

One of those homes belongs to Sandy Timmons, the grandmother of Ottawa FFA adviser and ag teacher Sarah Farnsworth, who received a call from her dad on Tuesday morning, asking for her help at her grandma’s house.

“I had never seen anything like it. They had never taken on water like that in her basement ever, in all the years they have lived there. Normally they get a little bit of seepage, but this was something else,” Farnsworth said.

Debris from the destroyed storage sheds had diverted the floodwater and silt into the basements of homes.

“A shed had come floating down from a neighbor’s, who is family, as well. Where it landed, it was diverting water, so the debris hit a window in her basement and blew that out and it was game-over from there — it just started to fill up like a pool,” Farnsworth said.

Farnsworth’s father and her brother and her dad’s cousins had been working on pumping out the basement since early on Tuesday morning. Farnsworth said the force of the water was scary.

“The way this water was coming so fast and hard to have moved sheds, it was crazy,” she said.

She worked with other family members to get the water and her grandmother’s belongings out of the flooded basement. Even with the water being pumped out, there still was a thick layer of mud and silt on the basement floor.

“They had run pumps overnight and they had pumped out the majority of the water. By the time I got there, there was about 4 inches of sludge. It was a very silty, watery, mucky mess down there. We had to shovel it into 5-gallon buckets and carry it up the basement steps and out of the house,” Farnsworth said.

Around midday on Tuesday, it became clear that more help would be needed.

“One of my dad’s cousins said, ‘I don’t know how long we can keep this up, going up and down those stairs. Can we get some help? Can you get us some FFA members?’ I said, ‘I can sure try,’” Farnsworth said.

Rallying Cry

Jeff Maierhofer and his wife weren’t in Seneca when the storm hit. With FFA students unable to travel to Indianapolis for the 2020 National FFA Convention, the Maierhofers took 12 members of the Seneca FFA on a trip to Indianapolis to make up for the lost convention trip.

“We weren’t home yet. Sarah said, ‘Could you get a couple of kids over here? We can’t get this done and we are overwhelmed.’ I sent out two messages, one to my FFA members and the other to my son’s baseball team, the 15U Illinois Irish team in Seneca,” Maierhofer said.

It being a Tuesday in July with students on summer break, on family vacations, at jobs and other activities, he wasn’t sure how many kids would respond.

“I thought maybe I’d get one or two,” he said.

He did — plus many more.

“Immediately my phone started blowing up with people asking where is it at, how do we get there, we’ll be there as soon as we can, all these messages,” Maierhofer said.

His fellow Seneca ag teacher, Kent Weber, headed to Seneca, as well.

Jessica Daggett, a Seneca FFA member who will be a senior when school starts in a few weeks, was one of the students who received the group message from Maierhofer.

“When we saw the message we headed over there as soon as we could,” she said.

Daggett, her dad and her brothers, Mason and Kenny, faced a challenge in getting there.

“We don’t live in town, so we had a few of the roads closed on the way over there, so we had to find another way to get there. We were calling and texting with Hof, trying to figure out which house it was, and he was in Indiana, so we had to work around that,” she said.

United We Stand

When they got to Timmons’ house, the havoc that the flash floods had wreaked was evident outside — and inside.

“You could see behind the houses that there were just entire sheds that were swept away. You could see the foundations, but the shed were gone. By the time we got there, the mud in the basement was ankle deep. It was a really thick mud,” Daggett said.

When Emma Smith and Harleigh Varland arrived, they too headed for the basement to help.

“There was a good layer of mud still down there. People were cleaning up the mud, which was about the consistency of pudding. We were taking squeegees and pushing the mud into big shovels and dumping them into buckets and then people were taking those buckets up and out and dumping them,” Smith said.

Farnsworth is accustomed to the work ethic of FFA members, but said the willingness to help a stranger moved her and her family.

“They came in, they didn’t ask any questions, they just dove right in. They were mud-covered from head to toe. They almost worked so fast that we didn’t have jobs for them. We just mentally were not prepared to have moved that fast,” Farnsworth said.

The students said they were happy to see so many people turn out to help. The group worked for about six hours on Tuesday afternoon and into the evening. A group of students and volunteers returned on Wednesday to help out, as well.

“It was a good feeling to see everyone come together. Most of the people who were there didn’t know her and it felt good to see that we are all part of a community who would just get up and help because someone needed it,” Smith said.

Maierhofer said he was moved by the instant and massive response he received.

“It made tears well up when you send out two messages and 25 people show up at a moment’s notice when they could have been doing something else. It’s a testament to the good people we get to work with,” Maierhofer said.

Farnsworth said her grandmother is getting her house back to normal and trying to recover from the flooding. She and all of the family are bolstered by the help they received.

“It was just incredible, all the work they did for us. I don’t know how to describe the feeling. I was like, these kids don’t know my grandma yet they came out and didn’t ask. They just knew somebody needed help and said, ‘OK, we’re going to help,’” Farnsworth said.