25 Years: The Michigan Storm That Helped Start Re-Member
As we celebrate Re-Member’s 25th anniversary year, we will be sharing archival photos, volunteer stories, and reflections from the memoir of Re-Member co-founder Keith Titus. Share your Re-Member experiences on our Facebook page, or by emailing: 25@re-member.org
Our work is funded in large part by charitable gifts. Join us in Re-Membering the past and celebrating the future as a founding member of “Team 25” with a recurring gift of $25 a month.
It was a storm that those in West Michigan still talk about 25 years later. WOOD-TV meteorologist Matt Kirkwood describes it as “one of the greatest thunderstorm complexes in recorded history.” It was a storm that would help start Re-Member.
A cluster of supercell thunderstorms, one of which produced a deadly EF5 Spencer, South Dakota, tornado on Saturday, May 30, eventually converged into a powerful line of thunderstorms called call a derecho.
The storms arrived in Michigan around 5 a.m. Sunday, May 31, and raced across the state. Gusts between 60 and 90 mph were common, with pockets of wind estimated at upwards of 130 mph in Grand Haven, Spring Lake and Walker.
The damage was impressive and extensive. Across Michigan, there were four deaths and 146 injured. Some 284 homes and businesses were destroyed and another 12,800 sustained significant damage. In all, damages were around $316 million.
Volunteers assist with unloading firewood at Pine Ridge. Summer 1998.
In the aftermath of the storm, Re-Member co-founder Keith Titus found himself thinking about the people of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, a community that he had been introduced to just weeks earlier alongside his wife, Ginny, and co-founder Mike Alles. Read Keith’s description of the resulting efforts, below.
Michigan firewood arrives at Pine Ridge. Summer 1998.
25 years later, Re-Member operates a robust Winter Heating Assistance Program as one of our key initiatives to Re-Member the past as we build a better tomorrow with the Oglala Lakota Nation.
One of our first efforts for the people of Pine Ridge resulted from a storm which blew through Ottawa County on an early morning in May of ‘98.
It was not a tornado, but created tornado-force winds which snapped huge trees throughout the county. It was a freak storm, in that it created a path which was so mysteriously specific that, in our backyard in Spring Lake, it took out two huge trees, and twenty feet away, left an empty pop can sitting on a picnic table.
As I rode through the streets, littered with, and often blocked by trees of every size and description, I heard, on the radio, the city manager talking about how they’d be chipping up this debris.
Seemed to me that was a whole lot of mulch, and I knew that a lot of folks on the Reservation heated with wood. I got on the phone and started calling.
Through Michigan State Senator Leon Stille’s office I was led to Andra Rush, a young Indian woman who was the owner of Rush Trucking, a national trucking firm out of the Detroit area.
Mike and I went to her office to visit her, expecting to be greeted by a weathered, and crusty elderly lady who smoked cigars and chewed tobacco.
Audra was young and beautiful… and tough as nails. She had grown that company from a delivery service she started with a beat up van and grew into a national trucking company. She was gracious to us and agreed to send two semi trailers to Spring Lake and park them to be picked up when we filled them.
Christ Community Church agreed to let us use their parking lot, and on Monday July 6th we set up a buzz saw and a splitter between the two semi’s and people began hauling in the downed trees.
For four days, 81 volunteers hauled, sawed, split and loaded 70 face cords of firewood into the semi’s which then hauled the wood out to a site just across the border from the Reservation in Nebraska.
We got excellent coverage from several TV stations and lots of other press. It was a great beginning.
Rush Trucking, for the next few years would often offer a truck and trailer to haul “stuff” out with.
It was at this event that the name Re-Member and it’s logo were first unveiled.
Ginny came up with the name. It was based on a healing of the breach between the indigenous people and the various invading Europeans (and later, the government of our country); putting back together that broken relationship.
In between working with the crews I designed a logo.
Keith Titus - RE-MEMBERing
Chapter Three: “We Name Ourselves”
25 Years Later…
During the cold, windy prairie winters — when temperatures can drop below zero for days at a time — many families on the Pine Ridge Reservation struggle to keep their homes heated.
Each winter, we cut, split, and deliver hundreds of truckloads of firewood to homes across the reservation and provide emergency electric and propane assistance, paid directly to utility companies.
Our Winter Heating Assistance Program collects funds from across the United States, and around the world, with 100% of proceeds allocated to a restricted fund in support of the program.
During the 2022-23 winter season, the program provided 785 loads of firewood, more than $15,000 in electric assistance, and purchased 15,800 gallons of propane and home heating oil.