Sep. 26--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.