Letter to the Editor: Swift Straw helps Liberty Baptist Church on LoveLoud project day

As a local business manager in Chelsea I love to see when our community businesses and residents invest their time and talents into making Chelsea a better place.

On Saturday, May 28, if you rode through Chelsea you probably saw a lot of neon green shirts around, and that is exactly what they were doing. Every year Liberty Baptist Church holds a service day called Love Loud Chelsea. This year my life group decided to do a little landscaping at Chelsea High School.

Chris Elmore, the head football coach at Chelsea, is also a member of our group and when we started looking for a project to take on he shared with us that the maintenance person at the high school had surgery earlier in the year and had not been able to keep up with all of his normal duties and said that the campus could use a little TLC. One project that needed a lot of attention were the shrubs and flower beds that surrounded the school, so I reached out to Swift Straw to get a price for pine straw delivery.

Before I could get off the phone with Ben, the sales rep at Swift Straw, and text our group the cost of the supplies, I saw on Facebook that their business was on fire. The Chelsea Fire Department as always responded quickly and had the fire contained, but because of the nature of the fire, there was a lot of smoke that caused the intersection of Old 280 and Highway 11 to be shut down throughout the evening.

I texted Ben around 5 p.m. that afternoon to make sure everyone was OK and not to be insensitive but also to make sure they still had some pine straw for us on Saturday. He laughed and said that they still had plenty. He also said that they would like to donate the straw to us as a way to say "Sorry" to the commuters and citizens for all the smoke in the air and shutting down Highway 11.

We had over 40 volunteers from Liberty Baptist Church show up to the high school that Saturday morning, and I will let the before and after pictures speak for themselves. Thank you, Swift Straw, for your donations, and thank you to all the volunteers from Liberty who helped with the variety of projects that took place that Saturday. Because of you Chelsea is and always will be a better place to live.  

-Submitted by Casey Morris