Chief Deputy Secretary of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality official meets with recovery team in county
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on October 8, 2017 1:45 AM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Chief Deputy Secretary of Environmental Quality John Nicholson volunteers with the N.C. Baptist Men at a home on Herbert Street damaged by the floodwaters from Hurricane Matthew Saturday.
Chief Deputy Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality John Nicholson visited Goldsboro Saturday, speaking with disaster recovery leaders and helping with rebuilding efforts a year after Hurricane Matthew struck the area.
Nicholson met with Chip McGuirt, N.C. Baptist Men's site coordinator for Goldsboro and Wayne County, a the Pineview Baptist Church early Saturday morning. McGuirt spoke about the work N.C. Baptist Men has been doing in the area since Matthew hit.
"I was in Fayetteville the day after the storm hit, and then they asked me to come down here within a few weeks," he said. "People right now want to go off to Texas or Florida, but I tell them Goldsboro is only an hour away from Raleigh and there's plenty of work to be done here."
N.C. Baptist Men has provided a great deal of the home recovery operations in Wayne County, McGuirt said. The organization acts as a sort of funnel for funds from the Red Cross, United Way and other organizations, which give McGuirt money to operate. He said that N.C. Baptist Men has around 57 jobs in Wayne County, with 13 of them open right now.
After the storm, the organization went to flooded homes and stripped them of anything damaged by water. From drywall and insulation to kitchen counters and carpeting, the "recovery" portion of disaster relief involved removing anything that could foster mold or mildew.
That, McGuint said, was the easy part.
"Recovery is fairly simple, you can do it without being skilled," he said. "With six or eight people, you can take apart a house in a day."
Rebuilding the house afterward is the exact opposite, he said. That takes skilled labor, time and money to accomplish. Some of the people in homes McGuint has worked on are still not allowed to live in the buildings solely because they are waiting on a particular type of vent to be installed in the kitchen.
Outside of the physical help, McGuint said that the mission of N.C. Baptist Men is to spread the grace of God to those in need.
"We don't push it on people, but when they ask us 'Why are you doing this' we tell them that it's because of the grace we've received in our own lives," he said.
Nicholson said that he valued the opportunity to come out and lend a hand. He said he hopes to learn ways to help prevent disasters like the flooding in Wayne County going forward.
"From a DEQ perspective, our focus has been on dam safety, heavy on the waste management, debris removal, underground storage tanks, as well as some of the wastewater and water infrastructure," he said. "One of our big goals working with the Governor's recovery team is to figure out how to prevent it from happening again, and that's a big task."
Nicholson and McGuint then drove to a nearby N.C. Baptist Men job site, where they worked together with volunteers on a landscaping project.