Volunteers help with cleanup after devastating floods

All right. Well, this morning, cleanup crews battling the heat in the Texas Hill Country after hundreds of homes were damaged by those floodwaters last week. That's where meteorologist Berkeley Taylor has been in Kirk County the last few days. Berkeley, you've talked to people who really have just lost everything. Yeah, guys, it's been devastating just to drive around here over the past couple of days. Talk with residents, longtime residents of Kerbal that have never experienced flooding before, but were inundated by water Wednesday night into Thursday morning, just as creeks, streams and of course the rivers around the area surged well above major flood stages. You mentioned hundreds of homes damaged. This is just one example that we have found this week. It's off of Junction Highway on the banks of Goat Creek, which Goat Creek, any residents that line the banks of that have seen a lot of damage. Some of the hardest hit areas were because of Goat Creek. This home yesterday we came by, they had clothes just lined up on their front porch trying to dry things out, save what they could. You can see now they've hung some of those up. What they could manage to save. The others have been bagged up in trash bags because so much mud, debris, dirt has just been caked on everything they have. We talked to a lot of folks that said the water started to rise and we just had to walk away from everything that we have all of our belongings. But so many people were getting into the fact that they are just thankful that their families, their pets, their neighbors were able to get out safely. Obviously there is extensive damage from the rivers from the creeks, but it wasn't just the rising waters of the Guadalupe Goat Creek Town Creek that caused damage to residential areas in some areas, neighborhoods across the town. It was just the sheer amount of rainfall. In fact, six miles south of here, there's a neighborhood that was inundated by a lot of water that came in Wednesday night into Thursday. Volunteers have been working around the clock in those areas as well to clean up the damage left behind from last week's storms. We have had more volunteers come through this house. I can't. It doesn't matter if you've had nine ft of water in your house or one ft of water in your house. They are working so hard in shifts all day into the night. The volunteers have really, really stepped up in Kerrville. Like I said, this is Kerrville strong. We stick together. We come together as a community and the foundation that has specifically been helping out the foster's home. It's called found on the Guadalupe, and it was started last year after the July 4th flooding. Now, just a year later, it is more than 30,000 members strong, and that's just one of many nonprofits that have been working again around the clock to help out folks not only here in Kerr County, but all across the hill country. That's also a big difference. We've been hearing from last year compared to this year is the fact that the damage is so widespread and because it is so widespread, the volunteers are spread very thin across the area, and everybody we have talked to you has said we need more help. All the organizations out here. They are. They're running low on manpower. So if you or anyone you know can help whether that's volunteering monetary donations, we've got information on our website, Fox four news dot com. I encourage you to go check that out because the damage very widespread and everybody we've talked to said the cleanup is gonna take quite some time. Well, and I think what's important to point out, too, is they've done this before, so they knew exactly how to mobilize. They're like, Okay, we know who's gonna step up for food. We know where that's gonna be. We know we're volunteer check. It's gonna be so they have this down, but now they need the people to come and fill. And they already have that hill country relief fund that set up and in place. Berkeley just mentioned. We've got all the information on our website, so that's already been established. And now they need even more support. Just needs some manpower or women power. Thanks. Thanks, Berkeley.