For Florida Man and Iowa Woman, Disaster Breeds Romance

Tim Sickel took one look at an overwhelmed Vicki Stringham as she stood in front of her flood-ravaged Valley Junction home on July 13, 1993, “and that’s all she wrote,” the disaster relief volunteer who’d planned to stay in Iowa only a couple of weeks said. “I fell in love immediately.”

He never left, not for good anyway.

The two married three years later on the anniversary of that day Vicki felt tired, worn down and at a loss as to where to begin cleaning up a house with buckled floors and stinking of a putrid mix of urine and fish.

The flood that swamped Valley Junction on July 10, 1993, was the worst disaster in West Des Moines’ history. Floodwaters from the Mississippi, its tributaries and its tributaries’ tributaries washed over 400,000 square miles in nine states, leaving behind a $20 billion path of mud-caked destruction in what history remembers as the Great Flood of 1993.

Devastated, Overwhelmed and Vulnerable

Even with recent apocalyptic storms, the U.S. Geological Survey ranks it still as one of the nation’s worst natural disasters. As murky floodwaters all along Midwest rivers receded during that summer of misery, homeowners likely felt just as Vicki Stringham did when she opened her front door and felt her heart sink:

“I just wanted to cry,” she said.

Stringham was three years into a relentless mortgage and her property was losing value one floorboard at a time.

“People don’t understand that when you go through a disaster, there are a lot of things out there to help you to find a place to live, but you still have your mortgage going on,” she said “If you are living by meager means, it’s just devastating, and to be single, as well, is overwhelming. You feel really vulnerable.”

As she was standing outside her ravaged home on the verge of tears, Sickel was being pressured by her brother to bring a volunteer team organized under his People Helping People First disaster relief non-profit across the street to work on his sister’s place.

“I would like to,” Sickel recalls telling the man, “but I have a life I have to get back to in Florida.”

Sickel was on loan from disaster relief work in Florida, where he had lived through Hurricane Andrew, at the time the worst hurricane ever to hit the nation's Eastern Seaboard. The emergency from the August 1992 storm had passed, and the Clinton administration asked him to interrupt his projects to help out in Valley Junction and Des Moines, where flood cleanup efforts were dominating the national news.

In Valley Junction that day, Sickel directed the man to resources such as free lumber and building supplies that were being made available to the estimated 400 Valley Junction residents whose homes were damaged in the flood.

Sickel recalls the man’s growing frustration and persistence. They had plenty of supplies, he told Sickel. What they needed was muscle and sweat.

“He was starting to tear up, and I can’t stand to see a grown man cry,” Sickel cracked. He also had more than a passing curiosity about the beautiful woman he’d just seen step out of the car across the street.

“Who’s that?” he said, recalling the 20-year-old conversation. “He said, ‘that’s my sister.’ I told him we’d have volunteers there in the morning.”

It was love at first sight for Vicki, too.

They dated for six months, then decided to see other people but remained close friends. The love between them never went away, though, and on July 13, 1996, the third anniversary of their meeting on Vicki’s flood-ravaged doorstep, they eloped to Las Vegas.

Still Picking Up After Disasters

Tim still chases disasters like the devil’s on his heels. 

It’s a matter of making good on a promise he made while hunkered down in a mattress-covered bathtub waiting for Hurricane Andrew to pass.

“I gave The Man a promise that if he would get me out of the house alive, I was going to help someone,” Sickel said. “When I saw my father later in Fort Lauderdale, he said 'you better keep your promise'.”

He is, in big and small ways.

Tim and Vicki spent their 17th anniversary this year building a wheelchair ramp for a critically ill friend. In September, they are leading volunteers from Tim’s 1976 New Providence, N.J., graduating class to help people living along the New Jersey shore rebuild homes lost in Hurricane Sandy.

Sickel has already recruited about 500 people for NP Helps Rebuild the NJ Shore, which will take place Sept. 6-8.

In 2011, some of his former classmates gave up their 35th class reunion to join Sickel on a building and remodeling blitz in Joplin, MO, left partially flattened by an F5 tornado.

“Anytime any kind of disaster comes up, we look at each other,” Vicki said. “I can’t deny him to go.”

If they were financially able, the couple would travel the country and volunteer full-time.

“There’s a disaster to be had 24/7,” Tim said. “That would be my way of living. When you are tired and worn down, it’s tough.”

Vicki, empathetic and mindful of the kindnesses shown her 20 years ago, is often at his side, offering the heart if not the brawn.