Flooded Burlington church gets no help from city or insurer
Over the last week, the church has worked to clean up the water, mud and oil residue that seeped in. The church was told damage estimates would be
Executive Pastor
Church Mutual initially told the church to do whatever it needed to keep further damage from taking place, Wood said. This meant taking everything out from the basement and putting it in storage pods that have been provided by Servpro, a company that helps with fire and water cleanup and restoration.
"We are dealing with a lot of water damage," Wood said. "We have to go ahead and address that and deal with that."
The church was also told by Servpro to cut the walls out to let moisture out from the backsides of the walls. The church began the work but stopped when it learned
"It is not clear," Wood said. "It wasn't clear to me on the phone, so I asked for a written explanation. Here we are on Tuesday afternoon and we still don't have anything in writing. The independent auditor talked to me and said it was denied basically because our policy doesn't cover anything related to flood, water damage from flood."
The church is trying to look at its insurance policy to see whether that is that case as this flood was not from natural cases but from a drainage situation, Wood said.
A few days later, the city mailed a letter to the church stating it would not cover the damage, either.
"Unless we can prove that the city was negligent in some way, they are not legally liable to assist us," Wood said. "That is tough because we love our community. As a ministry, we do a lot for our city."
Wood and Webster have called the city to talk about how the pipe could have burst in the first place, Wood said. He was told that the pipe "had a catastrophic burst," even though it was only 45 years old, he said.
"It is their pipe and their water, but it's not their fault," Webster said.
"They couldn't give us any reason," Wood added. "They don't know any reason why this would burst. To me, that was kind of making our point. Maybe there was some negligence in either the way this pipe was constructed or the way that this pipe was installed."
The city then told Wood the pipe was installed by the city of
"They said 'No, that wasn't on us. That was another company called
The church is now responsible for the costs and can't afford it, Wood said.
"We were hoping to have some advocacy with the city because of the nature of our church and what we do. We are a church that is very much focused on our community and helping folks in our community," Wood said.
To help try and make up for some of the work ahead of them, the church is hosting an emergency clean up party from
"We are having a multigenerational event where we will have grandparents and parents and teenagers outside and inside cleaning and scrubbing," Wood said.
The church's goal is to get all the items that were damaged from the flood out of the storage pods since the church has to pay for the storage pods' rent time. The pods have to be returned Thursday.
"These pods are very expensive, and they are full of all of our stuff. We have got to get all them cleaned out," Wood said.
The church also hopes to resume its Sunday school classes as it has missed the last two Sundays.
"At this point, we got to keep doing church," Webster said. "We can't wait for a month or however long for this to get worked out. It is about getting back in the swing of things."
Reporter
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