Danville man heading for disaster, on purpose

The story below was taken in part from the Danville Register. I met Jimmy 1 year ago at the Lady Lake tornado here in Florida. Sense then he has been here at the Florida Bible Camp 2 times to help me and also with me in California. In the photo is Jimmy(on left) and Gomez.

Some people retire after a lifetime of working and head for the golf course. Not Jimmy Nichols - he headed for disaster.

Nichols, who retired from the Department of Corrections in March 2005, bought a small motor home with the intention of traveling, but then Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005.

His church - Nor-Dan Church of Christ in Danville - rented a van and Nichols headed out with a crew to help.

He returned to Louisiana twice during 2006 to help again.

The next stop was on his own to Florida for a tornado disaster.

“When I went to Lady Lake (Florida) in January of 2007, I told the church I was going, but I didn’t know where,” Nichols said last week. “So I packed up the camper and left. I drove all night and stopped at the visitor’s center and asked a woman if she had heard of anyone doing volunteer work.”

The woman marked a map, and he took off.

He eventually met up with with the Churches of Christ Disaster Response Team, and he found a new mission in life working with the group that aids members of and recruits from Church of Christ congregations throughout the U.S. to help during disasters.

Last year, Nichols helped out with the tornado disaster at Lady Lake, Fla.; the tornado disaster at Enterprise, Ala., in March; and flooding in Finley, Ohio, in October. He also spent about three weeks in the fall near High Springs, Fla at the Florida Bible Camp.

In 1992, he also volunteered in Florida when Hurricane Andrew hit.

Most recently, he spent Dec. 2 through Jan. 8 in Southern California, helping people put there lives back together after the wildfires that burned thousands of acres of land in October of last year.

“I flew out to California with frequent flier miles a friend gave me,” he said. “When we flew in from Phoenix, we came in over the mountains, and it looked like an atomic bomb had exploded. The mountains were all black and charred.”

The Cremeans picked him up at the airport in San Diego and told him to “say good-bye to civilization.” They drove 45 miles east of San Diego to Barrett Junction, Calif., along the Mexican border.

“There were mostly Mexican-Americans or people who lived out there to be by themselves,” Nichols said. “We had to win their confidence. It wasn’t really a community because everything was so spread out. The fires had been so devastating that they had burned everything.”

One of the people the team helped was a man whose last name was “Gomez.” Nichols can’t recall his first name, but he remembers his story.

“He was renting property in sight of the border,” he said. “He was an animal lover and had eight to 10 dogs, 100 pigeons, chickens, roosters, goats and horses on four to five acres of land.

“He and his wife had been separated for 20 years, and she lived in the house and he lived in the trailer.

“He was hosing down the house to save it from burning when he saw that the trailer was on fire.”

The trailer burned down to the ground, so Nichols and others cleaned off the site so FEMA could put a trailer up.

They also worked cutting and removing dead trees and feeding people from a kitchen trailer.

“At first, we were feeding lunch and dinner for about 100 a day, and then it dwindled to feeding an evening meal from 3 to 6:30 p.m.”

Other times, Nichols would take out a group of volunteers and supervise them.

Although he didn’t initially plan on being in California for Christmas because he wanted to get home to take advantage of hunting season, it ended up that he did spend Christmas there.

“I went with the idea I would be there a couple of weeks, but there kept being more and more to do,” he said.

On the Friday before Christmas, the volunteers set up a tent with gifts and brought in a snow blower to pack enough snow on which to set a sleigh. Santa and Mrs. Claus showed up and took pictures with the children and handed out gifts.

The volunteers fed 350 people meals that night.

Nichols said it was worth being away from home during Christmas, though.

“It’s just seeing the look on people’s faces when they’ve lost everything and you’ve given them hope,” he said. “If anybody goes one time, it will get you hooked.”

People asked him why he was going out to California to help the movie stars who had so much money, but he said he told them not everyone out there had money.

He has the pictures to prove that some of the people lived in pretty dire circumstances before the fires even hit.

“You really meet such nice people, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “They come and help whenever they’re needed. My life has been blessed, and you can’t outgive God.”