PCM students help clean Monroe tornado aftermath

MONROE, Iowa — Two and a half days after numerous tornadoes touched down in the state, the clean up efforts begin.

“I had a friend tell me that we might come out here and then I got a call from the coach and just told us to come out here and help us, it’s pretty bad,” said Kevin Thomas, a sophomore at Prairie City-Monroe High School.

James Nolan is a teacher and an assistant football coach at PCM and saw an opportunity for some of the local student athletes to lend a helping hand.

“I asked our principal, Kristen Souza, if she’d be okay if I brought in about 14 kids that’d be good for a project like this to try to clean it up, and we’re running a PCM serves day anyway today, so I left in the morning with my group to get started out here and try to get some of this cleaned up,” said Nolan. His father and sister’s property suffered some damage to trees, barns and a mobile home. Their neighbor also had significant damage to their house as well.

With garbage, metal and insulation spanning multiple square miles, the football team was eager to help.

“I mean it was just sad really to see,” said Trenner Van Dyke, a junior at PCM. “I mean, a lot of people work really hard on these buildings and they got work to do. And they, they just got to deal with this. But, you know, as much as we can help, we will.”

“I think it’s really important. I think that community is one of the most important things that you can have, especially in like a small town like Monroe. Everyone’s kind of got to help everyone out a little to do their part,” said Harrison Brinegar, a sophomore at PCM.

Nolan’s sister had a vacant mobile home unit that she was about to have moved off the property, but the storm had other ideas.

“We’re getting ready to put cattle in here for pasture and use this barn for our show cattle, so we’re getting it cleaned up and prepared for that. And I think the wind came directly down our neighbor’s tree line from my dad’s farm and flipped the trailer because it’s moved 30, 40, 50 feet from where it stood,” said Jessica Barnett.

Barnett’s home didn’t have structural damage, other than a couple of grills getting smashed around in the storm. It wasn’t until afterwards that she realized that there had actually been a tornado on the ground.

“I heard a loud noise, kind of like a freight train sound. And I just sat in the basement. And then we started looking outside, didn’t realize exactly what had happened. So I looked at our neighbor’s house and I’m like, ‘something ain’t right here,'” said Barnett.

The 14 student volunteers spent the whole school day on Monday walking through farm fields and woods, cleaning any random debris they could find.

“It speaks a lot about the community here. We’ve got a lot of people, hardworking kids that, you know, didn’t even blink an eye to come out and lend a hand. And, you know, we would never been able to, taken us months and months, probably, if we were on our own trying to do it,” said Nolan.

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