More than a year after the Pigeon River flooded, devouring homes and entire neighborhoods in its path, Jack Sammons still has mounds of donated clothes warehoused in vacant buildings and tractor-trailers across the county.

Sammons, director of the Haywood Baptist Association, said getting the flood donations to flood victims has at times been an insurmountable task, largely due to the sheer volume of old, ratty clothes and broken junk that swamped the donation centers. It overwhelmed volunteers, and useful items were quickly buried under monstrous piles of undesireables.

“When that stuff started coming in, we just tried to find places to put it,” Sammons said. “We’d never done this before. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Before long, the Haywood Baptist Center had filled up a cavernous vacant building in downtown Canton, two buildings in Clyde and numerous tractor-trailers with a mish-mash of donations that would largely sit there undistributed for the next year. Some of it is now being sent to the Gulf Coast. Some is made available at the Haywood Baptist Associations’ flood recovery center. And some is being sold for a penny a pound to a salvage center in Winston-Salem.

Sammons said volunteers were swamped with a tidal wave of clothes and separating the wheat from the chaff has been challenging.

“Volunteers need to be helping people, not sitting in a warehouse sorting old clothes. It takes an army of people to separate it,” Sammons said. “We were spending our time toting it to the dump.”

Sammons said some of the clothing is so soiled that the smell is nauseating for volunteers sorting it.

But there were brand new items amongst the donations, too. Boxes of new baby clothes with tags still on them, toys still in their wrappers and boxes of cleaning supplies have sat undistributed for a year in a vacant building in Canton being used as storage by the Haywood Baptist Association.

One of the best scores in the weeks following the flood were pallets of brand new Hanes clothing — underwear, socks, bras, sweat pants, sweat shirts still in their wrappers. But it, too, is still waiting for distribution. Sammons said some of the Hanes items have been given to the Gulf Coast. As with the other donations, there was simply a volunteer shortage to sort and distribute the Hanes merchandise, Sammons said.

Willing to help

Other volunteer agencies providing flood assistance said they would have pitched in and helped if they had known the Haywood Baptist Association was overloaded.

“I wasn’t aware they had those types of items or any backlog,” said Jackie Bolden, disaster relief coordinator for Canton and Clyde with the United Methodist Church. In fact, Bolden had no idea a large building full of flood donations even existed.

Mike Clinton, disaster recovery coordinator for United Way, said he wasn’t aware of it either.

“I sure wish we had known about it. We could have done some more and helped distribute it,” Clinton said.

Several agencies in the county working on flood relief formed the Unmet Needs committee, which collaborated to provide assistance to flood victims. That committee would have been another useful outlet to spread the word about excess donations, said Denise Mathis, CEO of the Council on Aging and Mountain Area Resource Center, which is a partner in the Unmet Needs Committee.

“We would love to sit down with Jack Sammons and discuss how we can work together to help them as well as our community with the resources that they have. We look forward to talking with them and working with them on this project,” said Mathis.

Like with the Hanes merchandise and other flood donations collected a year ago and now being sent to the Gulf, Clinton said it is good that it will go to people in need, but it was likely given with the intention it would stay here.

“I think it was given under the assumption in would be used in this area and now it is being sent somewhere else,” Clinton said. Clinton agreed that clothes donations can do more harm than good by swamping an aid agency. The biggest needs for WNC flood victims a year later are furniture and building materials, he said.

Take it or leave it

The problem of being overloaded with clothes is not unique. Within hours of Hurricane Katrina, relief groups were already advertising to the nation not to send clothes. A collection site for Gulf Coast donations in the Wal-Mart parking lot last week featured a big sign announcing: “No clothes.” But it didn’t stop people from piling grocery bags of unwanted clothes by the door of the tractor-trailer when it was unmanned.

Sammons used to work with Haywood Christian Ministries. When the dumping of broken furniture and old clothes reached a crisis level, they built a fence around the property hoping to curtail it. Instead, people piled stuff by the fence. The staff and volunteers had to move it out of the way each morning before they could open the gate.

During Hurricane Floyd recovery in the eastern part of the state in 1996, clothing donations were so numerous, Sammons heard that people dug big pits and bulldozed clothes piles into them.

Less than a week after Haywood County’s floods in 2004, a tractor-trailer of donations arrived from Kentucky. When volunteers with the North Carolina Baptist Men began unloading it, one of them proclaimed it looked familiar and realized it was a tractor-trailer of donations they’d sent from this state to the impoverished coal country region just a month earlier.

When the preacher of a small Baptist Church in Murphy called Sammons one day saying his congregation had collected donations for the Haywood County flood victims — primarily clothes — Sammons was nearly paralyzed with fear. But he didn’t want to crush the church’s attempt at good deeds and told the preacher they’d appreciate the help. Sammons breathed a sigh of relief when the preacher pulled up to the headquarters in a small van toting only a few bags of clothes. After passing them to Sammons, the preacher wheeled around with a grin on his face and said “Wait, there’s one more thing.”

Stricken, Sammons thought, “Here it comes, there was probably a tractor-trailer following behind him.” But instead, the preacher presented him with a check for $1,200. If Sammons had turned down those clothes, he wouldn’t have gotten that much-needed cash donation, a lesson he learned early on. Shortly after the floods, Sammons was so overwhelmed by clothes, he put out the word that not only did they not need any more clothes, they were no longer accepting them.

“Suddenly, we didn’t get the furniture. We didn’t get the appliances. We didn’t get the baby formula. We didn’t get the diapers,” Sammons said. Everything stopped, so they lifted the clothes ban.

“It is frustrating,” Sammons said of the clothing crisis. “But then somebody comes along and you can help them. When that happens, all this other stuff just melts away. I have to remember we are doing this in the name of Christ.”

Rallying the troops

A year later, the Haywood Baptist Association is still short on volunteer power to do the sorting and discarding of clothes, especially when so many other needs top the list.

“People have said ‘why don’t you sell it and put the money back in the ministry?” Sammons said. “But people intended it to go to flood victims and it wouldn’t be right to turn around and sell it. People wouldn’t go for that.”

The Haywood Baptist Association has sent two tractor-trailer loads of clothing to Katrina victims so far. They are sending some to a poverty stricken community in West Virginia. They have opened their donations to REACH, the organization that helps victims of domestic violence in Haywood County.

Sammons has also found somewhere that takes the unwanted clothing — a place in Winston-Salem that pays a penny a pound for it. So as volunteers sort through it, they are loading the soiled, ripped, stained and ratty clothing into a tractor trailer truck and when it’s full, it will go to the salvage site in Winston-Salem. The trip that hardly seems worth the gas for just a penny a pound, but it is, Sammons said.

“When you fill up on of those trucks, it’s got a lot of poundage,” Sammons said.

They have slowly found help to sort the clothes. They sent one tractor-trailer of clothing to the state prison in Bumcombe County, where prisoners sorted through the clothing and got to pick out a few men’s items for themselves, as the state no longer provides discharged prisoners with street clothes upon release.

Last week — after initial inquiries by The Smoky Mountain News on what was being done with the backlog in donations — Sammons appealed to other Baptist churches in the county to help. One church accepted a load of clothing and members will sit around their fellowship and sort. Sammons said the environment of the fellowship hall is more comfortable for volunteers than the damp, dark musty building in Canton with mounds of garbage bags.

Never too late

One family of volunteers who has emerged to help with the monstrous sorting process lately is the Bryant family — Robbie and Jeanelle and their son, Bryan — who are flood victims themselves. The Bryants have spent dozens of long hours in the past few weeks sorting through the J&J Auto Parts building in Canton.

When the Bryant family’s home was flooded in Canton, they lost all their possessions along with their father-and-son business, Bryant Heating and Air Conditioning. All their tools, supplies and two vans were ruined.

“I figure we lost a quarter of a million dollars worth of equipment. It had taken us 10 years to acquire all that,” Bryan said.

The Bryants said they really could have used some of those donations that have been sitting in the J&J Auto Parts building, as well as the other buildings and tractor-trailers where Haywood Baptist Association has stored donations for the past year.

Jeanelle recently bought a bassinette, but found one still in its box when sorting donations in one of the buildings. An elderly neighbor who was flooded recently bought an iron when there was a perfectly good one in the donation heap, Jeanelle said.

The failure to move quickly on distributing donations not only meant people spent money out of pocket on things they could have gotten for free, but some things ruined sitting in the shell of the damp J&J Auto Parts building. Furniture that was in decent shape and attractive when it came in got so mildewed it was recently hauled to the dump.

The Bryants agree the volume of is overwhelming, but think people would be willing to help if they were asked.

“There’s at least 60 Baptist churches in Haywood County. If one member from each church came out for four hours a week, that would be 60 people a week down there for four hours,” said Bryan Bryant, 31.

The Baptist Association could have appealed to other denominations as well, inviting churches all across the county to come and get a van load and take it back to the needy people within their congregations instead of shipping it out of the state, Jeanelle said. And if that failed, let the flood victims pick through it themselves.

Sammons said his organization initially passed out donations carte blanche with no questions asked. A big banner was strung up over the door at the Canton donation center advertising free stuff for flood victims in all capital letters. But volunteers started to notice some of the same people coming through repeatedly and loading up on the most desirable items, like armloads of blue jeans. They soon learned from Canton police that two women had been taking clothes to the flea market in Candler and selling them.

“We realized we were getting taken advantage of,” Sammons said. “We wanted to get it to people that truly needed it. And we also wanted to be good stewards of these items that people had entrusted us with to go to flood victims.”

So they began screening people and limiting what they took.

But Jeanelle Bryant said it would be better for a few undeserving people to get the flood donations than prevent people who really need it from getting it, Jeanelle said.

Jeanelle said it takes a lot of clothes to replace a wardrobe. For several months she wasn’t going to church because she didn’t have enough nice outfits.

Sammons said anyone interested in helping sort flood donations can call the Haywood Baptist Association headquarters at 828.452.4746 or the Flood Recovery Center in Clyde that is operated by the Baptist Association at 828.627.9155.

The Haywood Baptist Association has done much more than disseminate donations. They became the go-to agency for flood relief in the area.

When the Downtown Waynesville Association held a fundraiser to help flooded business owner that intended to rebuild, they gave it to the Haywood Baptist Association to distribute to businesses in Clyde.

When a church group in Middleton, Tenn., wanted to donate $6,000 with the caveat that it be spent on appliances for flood victims, the Haywood Baptist Association set up an appliance program.

When the Lion’s Club International donated $5,000 with the mandate it be spent on food during the first 30 days of the disaster, the Haywood Baptist Association arranged it.

The Haywood Baptist Association worked with dozens of volunteer groups who traveled to Canton and Clyde to help gut flooded homes and rebuild. They matched up volunteer groups with flood victims who needed help, feeding and housing armies of volunteers on mission trips here.