Strangers Show Up to Undo Flood’s Dirty Work a Shovelful at a Time : Missouri: Residents appreciate government aid, but their highest praise goes to everyday people who pitched in. “I always believed in miracles,” one victim said. “I just didn’t know they shoveled mud.”

Dennis Simons drove 2,050 miles to scoop out Missouri mud from strangers’ basements.

He didn’t get a dime for his work--just satisfaction.

“When we heard of these folks here who lost everything, our hearts went out to them,” said Simons, pastor of the Fellowship Bible Church and one of 33 volunteers from the logging town of Sandy, Ore., who came to help.

“We wanted to get these folks back to living again. The question is, where do you start? Well, you start with one shovel at a time. You just shovel.”

Since July 30, when the Monarch levee gave way, an army of shovel-slinging volunteers has aided Chesterfield’s 49 homes and 287 businesses.

The people here appreciate government loans and help. But their highest praise goes to the everyday people who roll up their sleeves and sacrifice their Saturdays to make Chesterfield livable.

“I always believed in miracles. I just didn’t know they shoveled mud,” said Mary Dunker, the first homeowner visited by the volunteers.

“You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have bureaucracy. You don’t have red tape. You don’t even have to ask. They just showed up.”

Like other flood victims, she didn’t even know where to begin when she first saw her two-story home, with just 18 months left on the mortgage, swallowed by the monstrous Missouri River. “I needed a jump-start,” she said.

So did the entire community of 48,000 residents, located about 25 miles west from where the Missouri and the Mississippi--the two biggest rivers of the continent--converge above St. Louis.

Downtown Chesterfield and most of its residential neighborhoods sit high atop a ridge and remained dry. But an 18-square-mile, low-lying valley was overwhelmed when the Missouri punched a quarter-mile-wide hole in the Monarch levee.

Officials pegged the valley’s losses at $1 billion--the highest concentration of financial ruin anywhere in the Midwest--when floodwaters washed out the airport, businesses and fields planted with wheat, corn, soybeans and pumpkins. Some of the valley flooded again in September when rains returned.

But the recovery took a giant step forward when Mayor Jack Leonard, who recognized that his city lacked the resources to clean up by itself, included volunteer workers in his flood relief task force.

Strangers came from Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii, Oklahoma and Canada. College students from Colorado and Indiana worked side by side with Ohio Amish and Mennonites.

“They saved the valley. They turned our desolation into optimism,” said Leonard, still running the city under a state of emergency in November.

The job of coordinating this hodgepodge of help fell to Pastor Jeff Perry of the St. Louis Family Church, which was among the buildings flooded.

Perry offered the services of his flock to the cleanup, and the mayor named him to the task force. Perry not only directed the volunteers but, in what he called “shoe-leather Christianity,” got down in the mud to wash out basements and remove spoiled hams from delicatessens.

Perry’s father, Clyde, a retired consultant with General Dynamics Corp., organized the operation. Using a computer database, he arranged volunteers according to skills and dispatched them in work crews to homes and businesses.

The church purchased boots, shovels, squeegees, gloves, scrubbing materials, power washers, rubber gloves and crow bars. It arranged for doctors and nurses to inoculate workers against tetanus and hepatitis before they entered the flood zone contaminated with human and industrial wastes.

“This catastrophe really brought out the best in folks,” the elder Perry said. “There’s nothing glamorous about the work. It’s downright filthy. But there’s a sense of urgency in getting these people on their feet.”

Assisting the St. Louis Family Church were St. Alban Roe Catholic Church, the Antioch Baptist Church and other congregations.

“It was a nondenominational flood. So is the relief effort,” said Bob Mooney, a Catholic volunteer.

“When I see such devastation, I can’t walk away,” said the Rev. Ralph Greene, pastor of the Antioch Baptist Church. “We would still be sitting in mud if it wasn’t for the churches. There’s no other entity that could do this job.”

On a typical Saturday, volunteers assemble at 8 a.m. outside City Hall, pick out a pair of boots and some tools, then board buses to enter the surreal wasteland of gutted buildings and blackened farm fields littered with tires, barrels, logs, lawn furniture and pools of polluted water.

The volunteers are serious about their chores. When Ginny Campbell volunteered for flood cleanup, she begged off a detail assigned to scrub light fixtures.

“I want to go where it’s dirtiest. That’s why I came--to get muddy. I can clean light fixtures at home,” said . Campbell of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Creve Coeur.

She got her wish. By midmorning, her green sweat suit was saturated with mud.

Although the cleanup is well under way, it will take at least another year to rebuild Chesterfield. But the volunteers made a major contribution to repairing the psychological damage wrought by the flood. Moods have shifted from shock and anger to up-by-the-bootstraps recovery.

“The attitude lifted when we started cleaning. We knew there was going to be a tomorrow,” said Ed Holthaus, a real estate broker.

“The hardest work was done by the volunteers. They did the grunt work. It’s like cleaning out a septic tank with your hands. It’s America at its best when you see people coming from all over just to help,” Holthaus said.

There are already signs of renewal. Tender green shoots of newly planted grass are poking through the dirt on Wally Rombach’s farm, which his family has tilled since 1928.

In a normal year, the Rombachs gross $300,000 from harvesting thousands of pumpkins from the rich soil of the Chesterfield valley. But the flood wiped out the crop and inundated the Rombach family houses.

Thanks to the volunteers, the houses have been cleaned out and farmers are looking forward to next spring’s planting.

“I have to praise them. They were God’s gift,” said Rombach, 71. “They done wonders.”