The Canoe Got There Before the Rescue Boats

When the White River flooded a north-side Indianapolis neighbourhood, official crews missed people. A resident with a canoe, a church and a hand-made volunteer list have been running the recovery ever since.

Ravenswood is a small neighbourhood on the north side of Indianapolis, right on the White River. In mid-August the river rose over sixteen feet and went into the houses.

Some of those houses had been in the same families a very long time. Duke Gauchat's family has owned theirs for close to eighty years. Helen and Ron Wright have lived in theirs about fifty-seven, and spent the days after the water dropped pulling insulation out of the walls so mould wouldn't take the rest. Donna Shaw, who has been on the street about forty years, carried dozens of soaked vinyl records out of her house; the collection started with a Bob Dylan album she bought at twelve. Matthew and Kaatla Martin had moved in on August 11. The river arrived a few days later.

Official rescue crews worked the streets, and they missed people. So Gw Welsh got a canoe.

He paddled through the flooded blocks and took out neighbours and their pets, going where the boats hadn't been. Suze Stamm, who has lived in Ravenswood since 1977, left that way — by canoe, with her cat Tipper — and ended up sleeping at Glendale Christian Church.

That church, across from Riverwood Park, is what the neighbourhood built its recovery on. It became the hub: food, cleaning supplies, bathrooms, somewhere to wash your hands after a day in a contaminated basement. On August 17 Kim Saylor was out front making the signs that told people where to bring what.

The coordination was just as homemade. Becca Panyard, Kat Stuart and Abbie Downes set up a neighbourhood page to match what people had against what people needed. Ashlee York organised the volunteers. They held a meeting at American Legion Post 34 and put names against specific blocks.

That last part is the detail worth stealing. Panyard spotted the flaw in her own system almost immediately: older residents and disabled ones, the people not on Facebook, were falling behind everybody else, because the whole rescue was running through a network they weren't on. So volunteers were sent door to door to reach exactly those houses. Nearby Rocky Ripple had got organised faster. Ravenswood adjusted.

The needs list stayed stubbornly unglamorous. Box fans. Floor fans. Generators. Floodlights, because people were gutting basements in the dark. Mops, buckets, gloves, sponges, bleach, laundry detergent. "They need floodlights," Saylor said. "They can't continue to work in their basements because they don't have power." Local businesses donated dumpsters, and volunteers hauled ruined furniture out to them.

"If you just give something simple to a person who's had everything taken away, it matters a whole lot," Welsh said.

That is the whole method, and it works. Nobody in Ravenswood had specialist training. What they had was a canoe, a church, a list of streets and a fairly precise sense of which people on those streets were likely to be stuck.

Three weeks later the neighbourhood is still going — hauling, drying out, waiting for a federal disaster decision that would release money for people with no flood insurance. Ajan Reed's ground floor stood under water for days and there are still inches of it in his basement; he wasn't insured. Jessica Arviso lost everything downstairs and spent two days trying to get her insurance company on the phone.

Help from the state may still come. The help that arrived first, and kept arriving, came from four streets away.

Headlines record the flood. A map records the canoe.

Sources: Mirror Indy, Mirror Indy — photos, WRTV Indianapolis, WISH-TV