Seneca FFA, baseball team aid elderly resident after basement floods

A weather system dumped over 4 inches of rain on Seneca and its surrounding area Monday night, causing flooding and a collapsed road south of the Illinois River.

Seneca High School’s FFA adviser Jeff Maierhofer heard from Ottawa’s FFA adviser that her grandmother’s home, which was near the collapsed road, had a flooded basement, and her grandmother needed help. That’s when Maierhofer sent two texts: one to a group chat for the Seneca High School FFA and another for Seneca’s U15 travel baseball team.

“All I did was put out two text messages, and within seconds my phone started going off with students asking where to go,” Maierhofer said. “They didn’t say ‘I can’t’ or ‘I won’t.’ Everyone said, ‘Where’s that?’ and got there as soon as they could.”

Seneca senior Emma Smith said the group had almost 25 people helping between the two clubs at one point.

Maierhofer, who was in Indianapolis on Tuesday, said he was happy to see the students jump at the opportunity to volunteer.

Smith said it was an opportunity to help somebody in need.

“I felt bad at first because I didn’t know how many people would show up,” Smith said. “And then it was just something that I knew I had to go. I knew somebody needed help.”

Jessica Dagget, another senior, said she was running errands that day and hadn’t seen how bad the flooding was south of the river until she headed in that direction. The home is near where River Road collapsed, and from the front, the homes didn’t look like they had received too much damage.

The water in the basement was about ankle height by the time Dagget got there, and she said buckets were brought in to start shoveling out the mud.

Smith said the mud was the consistency of pudding.

“We just started scooping up as much as we could to put in the buckets, and we hauled them upstairs,” Dagget said. “We had some mats to protect the floor from our shoes, and we carried it all across the street to the ditch and dumped it out there. We had a line of people, and some were just downstairs filling buckets. The rest were carrying them up.”

Smith said it got to the point where the basement had muddy water everywhere instead of pooled water. She said they used a power washer to spray down the floors and the walls until the mud pooled together.

“It honestly wasn’t that difficult, which is surprising because I really expected it to be,” Smith said. “We just had so many people, and that made it a lot easier. We maybe got in each other’s way a little bit at points, but having so many people show up to volunteer helped the atmosphere, and it got the job done a lot faster than it could have been done otherwise.”