Texas Baptist Men volunteers helping Colorado wildfire victims

The group said 30 more volunteers are helping families in Colorado recover anything salvageable from their destroyed homes.

DALLAS - Teams of volunteers with the Texas Baptist Men are in Colorado helping families after wildfires devastated hundreds of homes.

The teams arrived this past weekend and the organization says they’ve already received hundreds of requests from families needing help.

"Total devastation to the home, the homeowners really don't know what they're going to do," said David Wells, Director of Disaster Relief, Texas Baptist Men.

On the heels of several volunteers just coming home after weeks of helping with tornado cleanup in Kentucky, the work has not stopped for the Texas Baptist Men. The group said 30 more volunteers are helping families in Colorado recover anything salvageable from their destroyed homes.

"They're going in with homeowners. Homeowners are identifying areas of their home that they believe they have valuables in, and then our teams are going in and sifting through the ash to find those valuables for them," Wells said.

Wells is headed to the state later this week. Three teams from Amarillo, Collin County and southeast Texas arrived in Colorado this past weekend.

The volunteers are in Boulder County, where a late December fire burned more than 6,000 acres and destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and other buildings.

"There's not a lot. You might come out of a home with a five-gallon bucket of items for them. We've, you know, we've had a little challenge of even taking step letters to crawl down, get down into their basements," Wells said.

Wells says their teams have already gotten 400 requests for help, working their way through the list home by home.

"They're trying to do as many as they can before that window is closed, whether it be by weather, whether it be by the county and state saying, Hey, we're not going to be in this area anymore," he said.

The volunteers are sifting through ash by hand to reunite families with their valuables as they start from scratch to rebuild their homes.

"We can offer a shoulder to cry on. We can offer a physical hand to pick up whatever debris we need to pick up and do whatever we can and to pray with them and then to offer them eternal hope is our thing that we can offer people," Wells said.