June 20, 2008

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – With the Mississippi River expected to crest today at 7 feet above flood stage, CRWRC Disaster Response Services (DRS) is meeting the needs of denomination members and flood survivors across Iowa and the Midwestern U.S.

President Bush planned to visit flooded areas swamped by a week of rain yesterday, according to the White House Press Office, and on Wednesday Congress approved $2 billion in disaster aid for Midwest flood relief. Some reports indicate that when rebuilding begins, repairs to infrastructure alone could total $1 billion.

"We'll be there to do what's needed most," says Christian Reformed World Relief Committee DRS director Bill Adams. "Right now, people need support and comfort. The water is still at emergency levels….All they can do is wait. We can listen when people need to talk and help search through debris for valuables as the water recedes. For survivors, its a helpless feeling."

The acres of murky water, now designated a 500-year flood, will take weeks to recede from homes, businesses and fields in and around Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa, where 200 Christian Reformed church families reside. Two member families lost their homes.

None of the denomination's 103 church buildings in flood-affected areas was damaged by the deluge.

CRWRC disaster response volunteer managers are coordinating local church and community responses in Eastern Iowa and Northern Illinois. Volunteer and partner trainings are scheduled for early July. Additional volunteers are assessing damage and developing flood relief plans in Indiana and Wisconsin. The agency is currently assessing needs in Watseka, Illinois, and Parkersburg, Iowa.

"When you add these recent floods with the tornadoes this Spring," Adams says, "we're talking about a disaster with the combined effect of Hurricane Katrina….This will be a long-term response."

Some CRWRC-DRS assessment volunteers are being diverted from Parkersburg, Iowa, where long-term recovery efforts were already underway after a late May tornado destroyed much of the town and killed an elderly couple who held membership in the Parkersburg Christian Reformed Church.

Iowa, the "heartland" of the Christian Reformed denomination, is home to a total of 27,000 church members who are among those hardest hit by the torrential rains that caused record-breaking floods in the 14 main river systems in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Missouri, and Minnesota.

Twenty levees have been compromised in the process, further flooding buildings and farmland. Miles of corn and soybean crops in the farm belt were destroyed. In an already volatile food supply market, an estimated overall loss of 3 percent of corn and soy crops is helping to push up already high food prices. Corn purchased domestically at $3 per bushel last year costs $7 a bushel this year. Experts estimate food costs will go higher.

"On a global scale," CRWRC international relief director Jacob Kramer says, "the implications of further stress on food supplies are critical. The higher the cost of food, the more people who are immediately hungry around the world – and the less purchasing power emergency relief and humanitarian aid organizations have to meet the increased need."

CRWRC reached 850,000 people with emergency relief in 2007 both in the U.S. and in many of the world's hungriest countries. CRWRC's community development and justice education programs in more than 30 countries improved the lives of 580,000 people who live on less than US$1 a day. CRWRC's goal in relief and development is to help people identify their resources and begin to transform individual, community and national sustainability.

In a May 15, 2008, working paper produced by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington D.C. ("Food Failures and Futures," Greenburg Center for Geoeconomic Studies), an address to the U.N. by Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade on May 4, 2008, was summarized with this statement: "The real goal of food aid should be building local agricultural capacities, bringing dependency to an end. Short-term famine relief efforts, including distribution of American- and European-grown crops, should be seen as emergency measures necessitated by failures in achievement of the larger goal, and not as ends in themselves."

Rev. Richard Verkaik, convener of this week's annual meeting of the denomination's highest deliberative assembly in Grand Rapids, Michigan, asked for prayer for the church's agencies, particularly the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, "that must be stretched to its very limit" by responses to catastrophic disasters in the U.S., Asia and around the world.

To give a financial gift to CRWRC's "Spring Storms 2008" response, including Midwest floods, go to http://www.crwrc.org/, or call 1-800-55-CRWRC. Checks can be mailed to CRWRC at 2850 Kalamazoo Avenue, SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49560.

Christian Reformed World Relief Committee