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Feb 18, 2014

Church Tries to Help Reservation Chilled by Propane Crisis

[Episcopal News Service] Sometimes a person in need encounters the Episcopal Church’s ministry at the gas station.

 

The Rev. Canon John Floberg, canon missioner for the Episcopal Church community on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, was paying his bill on Feb. 12 at a gas station on the reservation when a young woman told him about having to replace her frozen, broken hot water heater. She said she had heard that the Episcopal churches might be able to help folks like her.

 

Floberg took her $370 receipt and found the money to reimburse her. The woman, he suspected, was working at a minimum-wage job so such an expense would have taken about a week of wages.

 

Winters are always hard in the Dakotas but this year’s brutal temperatures have been made worse by regional propane shortages and skyrocketing prices.

 

The two counties that Standing Rock encompasses, Sioux County in North Dakota and Corson County in South Dakota, have the seventh and ninth highest poverty rates, respectively, in the country, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics reported here. Most reservation residents are Sioux Indians. Between 80 and 90 percent of the people on the reservation depend on propane. That’s about 5,000 homes whose residents are at some level of risk, according to Floberg.

 

Read the rest of the story from the Episcopal News Service.