By Jill Sperling

Hundreds of cleanup kits shipping out to flood victims in Grand Forks

May 23, 2018 | 2:57 PM

KAMLOOPS — Hundreds of Grand Forks residents were permitted to return to their home this past weekend. However, many of those homes were heavily damaged by the flood waters that spilled out through the city. 

“From what I’ve heard it doesn’t sound good. There’s a lot of people that have had a lot of damage done to their residences, their businesses,” said David Sakaki. 

Sakaki is a Kamloops firefighter and team lead for GlobalMedic, an organization that dispatches Canadian volunteers to disaster stricken communities throughout the world. 

He hopes to play a small role in cleaning up the mess left behind by flooding. 

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“What we have behind me are cleaning kits that we’re going to deploy in Grand Forks for the people that have been displaced from their homes,” he said. 

On Wednesday Sakaki loaded 250 Proctor & Gamble cleaning kits into a trailer before heading south to Grand Forks. 

The kits contain sponges, masks, cleaning solutions, and gloves. The kits are similar to those GlobalMedic provided for wildfire evacuees last summer. 

“It really did help the people that were displaced by the wildfires,” Sakaki said, “and I think it will probably help those that have been displaced by the flooding.” 

Once he arrives in Grand Forks, Sakaki will stay in the community a few days to assess the needs of residents. 

“This is almost a typical deployment for GlobalMedic,” he said. “We will head in there, we’re going to assess the situation. We have enough supplies to get going for a day or two, and if need be we’ll ramp up our operations, bring in more volunteers, and bring in more kits. But for now it’s an assessment and we’ll try and get out those 250 kits to the hardest hit people in the community.”

While the 250 kits will only begin to scratch the surface of Grand Fork’s clean-up needs, it’s one way for Sakaki and GlobalMedic to lend a helping had to a struggling community.