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The blue two-story house looked as if it had been swept from its foundation — fully intact — at the will of another power.

And at the end of the journey, it was left to collapse sideways in an empty field.

“What we thought had happened was that the water had taken the house from one area to another — there was just no foundation anywhere,” says Jake Richmond, who is in the Atlanta area on his first Salvation Army disaster trip. “It amazed me that water could take a whole house, keep it intact, and put it somewhere else.”

A corps trainee, Richmond and others from the Piedmont left Wednesday to help in the wake of torrential storms that resulted in the deaths of at least nine people in Georgia and estimates of millions of dollars of property damage in Georgia and Alabama.

Richmond joined the Salvation Army corps, a Christian social service organization, right out of high school, knowing disaster response would be one of the assignments to come. And that’s fine by him: It gives the 19-year-old an opportunity to work his faith.

“It gives me a lot of satisfaction knowing I’m doing what God’s called me to do,” Richmond said via cell phone from an Atlanta suburb.

He was packing up the mobile canteen he and traveling partner Capt. Mike Rodgers planned to drive through neighborhoods to serve lunch and dinner — on the menu were assorted meat sandwiches for lunch and Salisbury steak and rice, and ravioli and mixed vegetables for dinner.

Since Thursday, he and Rodgers, of Mount Airy’s Salvation Army brigade, have been making their way through roads of destruction, mostly in Cobb and Douglas counties, handing out food and bottled water — and a bit of compassion as homeowners returned to assess damage and clean up.

“I thought it was going to be bad, but I didn’t expect to see people that desperate,” says Richmond, who at one stop ate dinner with a family whose mobile home near Six Flags over Georgia had flooded. “They talked about how they are living with family members and how their house is totally gone. All the things they could save were on a picnic table.”

Steve Still, a disaster response veteran who is also head of maintenance at the Salvation Army’s Greensboro headquarters , expects Richmond will come back even more fired up about the work of the nonprofit.

“We went to Texas for Ike last year,” said Still, a veteran of 20 disasters . “When we first met up with the convoy to go down to Texas we were sleeping in a gym on cots with electricity. The next night we were sleeping in a gym without electricity. The next day we were sleeping outside on cots. The next day we did find accommodations. We leave here with sleeping bags and mats — understanding we might have to use them and willing to do so.”

During Hurricane Katrina, the only place standing when another Greensboro crew arrived in Biloxi, Miss., was half a warehouse.

“You are out there with spiders and alligators and all those things that have been disrupted from their homes,” Still said. “When you see it firsthand, it can’t help but affect you. It’s going to be a life-changing experience for him — hopefully an affirmation of how lucky we are to be able to do this kind of work. He’ll come back older than when he left.”

Richmond, if given the chance, would like to tell those he encounters how God brought him through his own rough times — foster homes and bad family situations — to be a stronger person.

“They don’t want to hear that right now,” Richmond concedes. “Really, they want to talk about what has happened. They want someone to listen to them.”

And, he’s willing to oblige.

Like the man who raised the hood and opened the doors of his car to try to dry it out. He saw some hope in a car he could crank even though its computer system was dead.

The car had been submerged in the spillover from nearby waterways. I t was the only vehicle the man had.

Along the way, Richmond has encountered a dislodged boulder as big as a house and a weather catastrophe that has served as an equalizer.

“Both the rich and the poor have the same problems, except one’s probably going to come out better financially,” Richmond says.

But, he says, it all would make a great sermon.

“As you can imagine, the stress level is high. People have lost everything that they’ve worked for all their lives. But you see these people who have lost everything but are pitching in to help their neighbors. It gives you a good visualization of what should be — neighbor helping neighbor and sweating and hurting with people you don’t even know.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com