At the end of May, a tornado took a long and destructive path through northern Colorado. While several communities were affected, Windsor took the most direct blow. Just two weeks later, Episcopalians and others gathered each morning at St. Alban’s in Windsor, eager for clean up and restoration assignments. Two youth groups who had planned to spend a week in Juarez, Mexico building houses, found themselves in Windsor and the surrounding area, doing everything from tearing off damaged roofing material, to picking debris out of a pasture, to pulling a garage door out of a lake.
Two youth missions – one from northern Colorado churches in Longmont, Boulder and Loveland, and one from Calvary in Golden – who had originally planned to spend a week in June in Juarez, had to cancel those trips due to safety concerns, and spent the week in Windsor instead, helping with cleanup and recovery. The groups performed a variety of tasks – putting new roofs on houses, building new fences and helping residents there get back on their feet, or accomplish repairs they did not have adequate insurance to cover. In addition, throughout the week, volunteers from all over the front range gathered at St. Alban’s in Windsor in the morning to be dispatched out to help sort donations in the donation and resource clearing house, help haul debris to the county dump and do other clean up and recovery work. Deacons Jan Dewlen, from St. Stephen’s Longmont, and Rhoads Hollowell from St. Mary Magdalene helped to organize these efforts, in conjunction with other area relief agencies and churches. Fortunately, St. Alban’s church building sustained minimal damage, but some of its members did have damage to their properties, and volunteers did help with repairs to those properties.
Tim Gilbert, the youth pastor at Calvary in Golden, who led one of the youth groups redirected to Windsor said that the highlight of their time was a visit to a Windsor nursing home. “The folks there had not had a group come and visit for four months or so,” he said. “We had as good a time as they did.”
One Windsor resident thanked the members of the youth groups who had rebuilt her fence, and made significant progress towards rebuilding her roof, and said, “It just restores my faith.”
Deacon Jan Windsor, who serves at St. Alban’s, summed up the progress in the area this way: “Has everything been done? No, of course not. That will take the better part of a year. But in many cases a lot has really been done. Are there people out there who care about us, who don't even know us. YES. And that is what touched the people of Windsor, even to the point of tears.”
