Volunteering at Slave Lake

For those of you who didn’t hear about it, the town of Slave Lake was hit on May 15 with a wildfire that destroyed 40% of the town. Six weeks after the fire and just two weeks after the residents returned, massive amounts of rain caused the town to flood. It’s a pretty heartbreaking story and one that I’m sure will never be forgotten by the 7000 residents of the town.

On Sunday night my dad informed me that there was a bus heading to Slave Lake from Grande Prairie to help out for the day. So, at 10pm that night, it was confirmed that we could have a seat on the bus leaving at 5am the next morning.

Thanks to my uncoordinated sleeping schedule I did not sleep the entire night and joined my dad for a very early breakfast. As we drove to meet the bus, we realized that we had no idea what we were going to be doing—all we knew was that we were going to be spending the day in Slave Lake helping out. Despite the lack of any formal details we carried on and met up with this (note the top of the bus): 

The term "Mystery Trip is much more foreboding glowing against the dark 5am sky

This did not instill much confidence. We got on anyway and after a long (and still sleepless) three and a half hours, we were in Slave Lake. They brought us into a MASSIVE mill that had been abandoned due to the whole town effectively shutting down. Inside was a giant pile of garbage bags and boxes filled with donations from people all across the country. Our job was to empty the bags and sort the clothing into their different sizes and genders and pick out stuff that wasn't in good condition or in current fashion. At this, a 65-year-old volunteer asked, "What about the young people?" and I was very glad that the hipsters were taken into consideration. We decided to keep the clothes unless they were in bad shape or extremely, extremely horrendous.

The shear size of the pile made it a rather daunting task, but once we got to work we were able to develop a rhythm and it was actually quite enjoyable. There were 32 of us on the bus and we were joined by eight members of a correctional facility. We each had our own table where we could dump our bags out, sort through them, and then place the good stuff into the storage bags. 

Just a part of the pile

Our view as we worked

The large storage bags we used for organizing

Our tables and some sorters at work

With donations coming in so quickly and from all over the country, we found some pretty interesting things. Here are a couple of my favourites:

• A perfect-condition Halloween costume of the yellow Teletubby—because that’s the first thing people look for after a disaster. I was also amazed that I was able to identify it as Laa-Laa (who knew colourful, pudgy aliens were so memorable?)
• Six identical dark green t-shirts that had home-made cut up collars and sequined shoulder pads.
• A tie skirt. Yes, a skirt made entirely out of ties sewed together.
• An entire garbage bag of traditional Ukrainian garb.
• A barely used $400 padded motorbike jacket and an adult wetsuit. Congrats to the amazing person who gave up those.
• Brand new, pointy, white, men's Italian shoes. This is not entertaining until you consider that someone donated these to a small town in Northern Alberta.
• A bag full of wigs. Again, not really typical disaster-relief stock material.
• More than one Santa outfit for a dog. If I had my choice I would have immediately placed these in recycling, but sadly, I wasn't the one who found them.

I also learnt a lot about donating, myself. Seeing as there were so many donations to sort through (more on that later), bags that were donated without much thought or care were considered less than helpful. I learnt a lot of quick tips about donating that I didn’t know before:

• This is NOT a time to get rid of your garbage. I literally went through bags with used diapers in them. While the thought is nice, nobody really appreciates it. If you are done with your oil-stained, used-to-be-white-once t-shirt that you won from a beer company and now use as a car rag—throw it out!
• Wash your clothes before you send them. I was shocked at how many items had dirt or pet hair on them that could have easily been removed with a simple wash. A lot of clothes were also found folded inside out. Take the two seconds and arrange them effectively.
• Tie or tape pairs of shoes together—a simple thing that will help with the organizing and stop a sorter from throwing them in the recycling because they can’t find the matching shoe.
• If you want to be loved and admired by the sorters, go so far as to organize and label your donations. Nobody admitted to it, but secretly we all looked for garbage bags that had a masking tape label already on it. We organized it into Boys (0-2, 2-6, Junior/Teen) Girls (same), Mens (S, M, L, XL), and Womens (same).
• Donate more than clothes. I didn’t really think about this one because clothes are always the first things that come to mind, but there is a lot more that people need. Bedding, linens, bathroom items, kitchen items, accessories, pretty much anything you use on a daily basis, are all important. 

My back was killing me by the seventh hour, but it was worth it. At one point I had a near heart-attack when I realized that my cellphone, which I had placed on the table, was no longer there! I looked out over the thousands of bags we'd spent all morning packing and wondered what the chances were of hearing a tiny vibrating phone in one of them. Thankfully, I found the phone 20 minutes later a good ten feet away from my table. Yikes!

After eight full hours and really good lunch, we were all completely wiped out. Thanks to a lot of coffee and sugar I survived despite my all-nighter, but I was ready to crash the second we got on the bus to go home.

On the way home the bus driver took us through the actual town and narrated where the fire had spread. It was certainly a humbling experience looking down a street where an entire suburb had once stood and seeing nothing but the foundations of the homes. The most amazing part was how much the fire skipped around. There were remnants of a house sitting right beside buildings that were completely unharmed. In one case the garage was completely untouched but the house was gone. It certainly stands as a reminder about how temporary and transient our belongings are.

What's left of a residential street

A house left with melted siding as the house in front of it is completely destroyed

Stairs leading up to what used to be an apartment building

The town hall/the town library

Remains of a house

Remains of a city transit bus

Another look down a typical residential street

These pictures show pretty heart-wrenching scenes, but we can take comfort in the fact that nobody was killed in the fire. The residents had enough warning that the entire town was able to evacuate before the fire rushed in. It will take years to recuperate, but the residents have every intention of rebuilding the entire town.

The encouragement came at the end of the trip where we got to see the final product of our work:

This is a curling rink that the town turned into a shelter for the donations. Anyone who was affected by the fire is able to go in and take whatever they need. It was definitely cool to be able to see the direct effect of our work.

At the end of the day my dad and I guessed that between the forty of us sorters we had probably worked through about two full semi-loads worth of donations. We were proud of our work as we had organized about a quarter of the pile that was sitting in the mill. To our astonishment, as we drove away the bus driver pointed out ten more semis that were lined up outside the building, waiting to be unloaded! As if that wasn't enough, he said that there were FIFTY more waiting in other towns around Alberta. Combining what had yet to be unloaded, what we had worked on, and what had already been organized, we figured there were over 100 semis worth of donations to Slave Lake!! How amazing is that! There were so many donations in fact that the government is trying to relocate the fifty semis to other places that need it more (considering that, in the short time we worked, we organized more than enough to clothe the entire town of Slave Lake a couple times over). It definitely stands as an encouragement and an amazing testament to the power of people uniting under tragedy.