Asda Foundation donates cleaning products to help South Yorkshire flood victims
Asda Carcroft store manager Terry Edwards was one of the colleagues from some of our stores across South Yorkshire who volunteered to help out with the clean-up operation in Bentley, Doncaster. He tells us more...
You don't realise how devastating the flooding has been until you get here. Some people have lost everything. The water's gone now but there's a big clean-up operation to do.
We've had people coming into store all week asking for mops and things to help them clean up. We initially donated around £1,500 worth of cleaning supplies as a store, but we wanted to do something on a bigger scale.
We got in touch with the Community team at Asda House who organised an Asda truck to deliver 12 crates of cleaning supplies as well as baby food and baby milk. We got a group of colleague volunteers together from Carcroft, Rotherham and Barnsley to unload the supplies and help with the clean-up operation.
We picked up rubbish and debris from gardens, removed carpets that had been destroyed by the floods and helped to clean up. We worked on one residential caravan site where it looked like the floodwater had gone through everything – some of the homes had nothing left in them.
One of my colleagues who is currently on maternity leave was affected by the floods herself so colleagues popped into check on her too and gave her cleaning supplies.
You can really see the real community spirit here with everyone helping each other out. The fire brigade have been here since last Friday pumping out water from homes and streets. When they rolled up their hoses and were about to leave the local residents decided they wanted to clap them off which was a nice touch.
When we there we bumped into two times world champion Jamie McDonnell who had stopped to see what was going on. He was a plasterer by trade and had come to see if he could help. Ed Miliband, Labour candidate for Doncaster, has been there for a few days helping out and had a chat with us about what we were doing.
We've set up a temporary warehouse in a storage area for cleaning supplies. A lot of people were just happy that we were there - they want people to see the devastation and understand the scale of it.