Elderly man and wife try to get by in wake of flood

BY KATIE SULLIVAN,  Times-Shamrock Writer

Joe Sturek slowly descended the stairs to his cellar where everything was covered in a muddy layer of slippery and grimy film.

He picked his way carefully across a pile of chopped wood the floodwaters had moved from their stack, stooping occasionally to heave a piece out of the way.

He grunted from the effort and stopped often to wipe his hands on a rag and catch his breath.

“I’m going on 92 years old,” Sturek said. “I can’t do this no more.”

After he cleared a path to the cellar door and a tedious escapade through overturned work benches, canning jars and tools in search of a screwdriver, Sturek pounded a crowbar into the crease of the door, determined to pry it from its swollen wooden frame.

He yanked the door open 15 minutes later and pushed open a second set of cellar doors – a flood of not water, but fresh air, entering the damp, stagnant-smelling basement.

He stepped outside, looking back to survey the damage done to his basement, and wondering out loud how he was going to get it all cleaned up.

“I can’t do it all,” he said.

Kelly FitzGerald came over to help her great-uncle and his wife, Betty Sturek, 80, as much as she could. But with so much damage done and at their age, she said she knows more help is needed.

“I wish there was an organization or something to come around and help,” FitzGerald said. “It’s more emotionally stressful for both of them.”

They have been through floods before. Sturek has lived in his home on Main Street in Hallstead since 1955. In 2006, the flood was worse, but he was younger then, and not dealing with a back injury he suffered last year after a fall from his attic. It was work, but they got through it.

“We’ll get through it like we did last time,” Betty Sturek said.

With Joe Sturek’s son in Florida and her family up in New York, she said they don’t have a lot of people to come help with the cleanup. She hoped people from their church would come by and help, but no one had shown up as of Sunday morning.

They love their home, Betty Sturek said. They sit on the back porch and observe nature, admiring the wild life that comes from Salt Lick Creek, a just a few hundred yards from their house.

“We watch the deer play,” she said, motioning to the mass of water that is usually grassland. “That’s the one thing that keeps us here.”

Joe and Betty. Sturek are doing the best they are able, cleaning what they can and working to get things back to normal, even if it is physically and emotionally draining.

Joe Sturek climbed the stairs from his cellar and sat down on his bed, exhausted from opening the door in the basement in the wake of the flood.

“When you get older it works on you,” he said, taking off his worn baseball cap and laying his head on his pillow.