A report on the clean-up effort following the June 5, 1976, Teton Dam disaster in eastern Idaho, as reported in the September 1976 issue of the Cleverly Newsletter.
A hand-scribbled sign on the wall of the Rexburg Idaho North Stake center reads: “Let’s bring order out of chaos the priesthood way.” And that’s what thousands of faithful, dedicated Rexburg Saints are trying to do, assisted by millions of man-hours of labor donated by thousands of other Saints from southern Idaho, western Wyoming, and northern Utah.
On Thursday, July 8, I took a day off work to go with some 260 others from our stake to help in the great clean-up effort. We left at 3:45 in the morning on six chartered buses and arrived back in Salt Lake at midnight, very tired, but very grateful to have been able to serve our Idaho brethren.
It was sobering to see the destruction, the utter dirty mess that was still around in the north and west parts of Rexburg, and to realize that a full month had passed since the flood.
I helped a man whose jewelry store still needed more cleaning. Mud was everywhere. He was one of the fortunate storekeepers. He had lost only his entire inventory and his home; he still had his family and his faith in the gospel and his shop. He was optimistic and grateful.
What we were helping do on that day was also being done on other days by volunteers from scores of other stakes—an excellent example of how the Saints can bring order out of chaos the priesthood way.
Elder Boyd K. Packer said that “it is not without probability that all of us will face challenges such as this in the generation ahead and that this is a suiting up and a preparing for all of us” (Ensign, Aug. 1976, 70).
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