Calming The Storm: The Life of a Flood/Disaster Bucket

Calming The Storm: The Life of a Flood/Disaster Bucket: Part of the Disaster Care Ministry at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church is our Bucket Brigade. This year alone, we have already distrib...

The Life of a Flood/Disaster Bucket

Part of the Disaster Care Ministry at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church is our Bucket Brigade. This year alone, we have already distributed over 1000 Disaster Buckets and we have another 200 ready for delivery. I often get ask what a Disaster or Flood Bucket is and how our program works.

Flood Bucket with its contents

A Disaster/ Flood Bucket is a 5-gallon bucket containing cleaning supplies. Each bucket contains a roll of paper towels, a rag or cloth, a bottle of glass cleaner, a bottle of liquid cleaner (like Spic & Span), a powder cleaner (like Comet), a gallon of bleach, a scrub brush, two pairs of rubber gloves, 2 sponges and devotional material. We also send a Bible with each Bucket.

Picking up empty buckets at our local Home Depot

Although we purchase most of our bucket supplies, some items are donated.Our funds for purchasing supplies come from our fund-raisers, donations from individuals and churches, and grants like the one we currently have from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Assembling Flood Buckets

We order most of our supplies on-line from Dollar Tree. They are delivered to the local store where we pick them up. We try to get our buckets donated, but when we have to buy them, Home Depot gives us a good discount. After we have picked p our supplies we schedule a work day to assemble the buckets. We store the buckets in the same room we assemble them in.

Loading the Trailer

The Buckets are stored until they are needed. When we get a request, we load the buckets into our trailer.

Unloading Buckets at Bethel Lutheran in Bryan, TX.

Working through the local Lutheran Church, we deliver the buckets to the area affected by the disaster. When possible we help deliver the buckets to the victims.

Delivering buckets to McAllen Texas to be sent to Southern Mexico.

We always try to work through the local church or other Lutheran organization.Our ministry is based on a ministry of presence so it is important that we make that personal contact, listen to the victims and ask to share a prayer with them.

Annual fund-raising dinner.

 Those who deliver the buckets are always ready to share the hope they have in Christ Jesus. Without that, we are just another social ministry.

Passing out buckets at the Arlington Tornado recovery Center

The LCC Comfort Dogs Helping us deliver buckets

Feeding Disaster Victims in Bryan, TX

Saturday and Sunday A few members from the Disaster Care Ministry joined up with the folks from The Holy Cow Smokers from Lamb of God in Flower Mound and Bethel Lutheran in Bryan to feed victims of the tornado and floods that hit Bryan Texas on May 28.

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We fed pulled pork sandwiches for lunch on Saturday, Sliced Brisket for dinner, and chopped brisket sandwiches for lunch on Sunday. 921 meals were served in all.

Volunteers packed the meals and took them out and distributed them in the areas that were impacted by the storms. We also delivered meals to the local fire stations that have really been taxed in the aftermath of the storms.

In Addition to meals, the workers took flood buckets (provided by the Disaster Care Ministry), Kitchen Kits (provided by Tree of Life in Garland) and Comfort Kits (provided by the Lamb of God LWML). Many of the items distributed were made possible through grants provided by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

We met many great people. Ross Johnson, Pam Neilsen and Peter Slayton came from Synod to help, and Steve Misch came from the Texas Distict to assist us.

A  lot of people were touched by the weekend effort and we even had a man who was Baptized on Sunday. Thank you to all the great volunteers that made this all happen.

Disaster Buckets to Bryan, TX

On Thursday, May 25 heavy storms moved through the Brazos Valley dumping torrential rain and spawn tornadoes. One tornado struck in Bryan Texas damaging 153 homes. In addition to the tornado flooding was experienced all around the city.

On Saturday, May 27 I received a request to take buckets to Bethel Lutheran Church in Bryan, TX.  We had just received supplies for our buckets, so I contacted our team to come to the church at 1:00 PM to assemble buckets. 

On Monday, we met again at 10:00 AM to Load the Trailer.

After Loading the trailer, we took 3 pickups and went to Home Depot to pick up our order of 480 empty buckets and lids that had just arrived.

We delivered 200 buckets to BethelLutheran in Bryan on Tuesday. Included in the load was the 1000 bucket we delivered in 2016. This is a major milestone for the Disaster Care Ministry. We have never delivered 1000 buckets in one year before. We could not deliver this many buckets without the assistance of LCMS Disaster Response and the Grants we receive from LCMS Domestic Development.

A fringe benefit for me was that I got to have lunch with my son, Matthew. Mathew is attending Texas A&M University. 

This is the seventh disaster we have responded to this year.With God's grace, we will be able to continue this work.