December, 2018

Incoming.....

Morro Bay where Art and Barb contemplated the life of the rich and famous. 

This was a very fun month as we had Canadian friends (and fellow pilot)  Art and Barb come all the way from the Canadian frozen north to visit us for the better part of a week. We visited many of the obligatory local sights, and had great fun for the time they had available.

 Outside the prison I worked at for 30 years

Art and I tearing up the miles of sand dunes at the beach near our house

Disaster talk

Last month, I wrote of my first deployment to New Bern, North Carolina. I didn't want to write a book so I saved some of the details for now. Some have asked what it was like and about the living / working conditions. Team Rubicon is a volunteer organization manned by mostly veterans so it has a distinctly military flavor to it. No one salutes, there are no ranks but it is heavily laden with military lingo which veterans are familiar with or pick up in a hurry.

Mobile command center with satellite uplinks and a few of the equipment trailers. Brown mess tents are in the background

The FOB (forward operating base) is where we all live, eat, shower and have all of our equipment inside the WIRE (chain link enclosure to keep all our stuff secure). The mess tent is self-explanatory but at the end of the day we DECON (decontaminate or clean) all the tools, restock and get ourselves ready for the next day. Strike teams are 6-man (person) teams that work together and travel in a fleet of rented extended cab pick-ups to the homes assigned to us by IC (incident commander). Meanwhile, LOGS (logistic people) prepare meals, sharpen tools, acquire anything needed to keep the strike teams going.

Sleeping trailers and showers

The food was superb, but the toilets were porta potties (pretty rough at 3 AM in the rain when it is 39 degrees). I got moved from the exercise room of the fire department to a small co-ed trailer with 16 people inside. Cordwood comes to mind.

The work was straight forward. We would set out in 6 man strike teams after breakfast and a briefing, to a home by 8 AM. Probably half were mobile homes and half conventional homes. Many had no insurance and one told me he had $30,000 of insurance on his house. I was struck by the fact that I had more insurance on my car than he had on his house. A good part of the surrounding communities had 3 out of 4 of its residents living below the poverty line...before the flood.

In most cases, 6 feet of water had entered the homes, meaning that absolutely everything they owned was ruined. We would start by removing all appliances (refrigerators, TV's, ovens, etc, etc), all furniture (beds, sofas, desks, dressers) all clothes, dishes.. absolutely everything they owned, and take it to the curb of the road as they had no sidewalks. Think moving day but everything goes to the dump... someday.  I drove one road that had piles of debris about shoulder high, 15 + feet wide on both sides of the road for about 3 miles. It will likely be years before it can be taken away.

One two story home was in a low-lying area and the entire house was 30 feet underwater for nearly 3 days. When we got there, I went to the upstairs bedroom to start removing a dresser and opened a drawer. It was full of water. Following removing all furnishings, we would proceed to tear out all the drywall, insulation (it wicks all the water), ceilings and flooring (carpet, tile, linoleum, wood floors) right to the studs. This was to allow the homeowner to start fresh without all the mold that inevitably sets in. I am at a loss to see where they will get the money.

The nastiest work always included having to don a waterproof Tyvek suit with hard hat and attached work light, safety glasses and multiple layers of waterproof gloves. This allowed me to crawl into the 3-foot-high crawl space in the mud and toxic water (the area is full of chemical plants and pig farms that spilled their contents in the flood water) to remove the insulated ductwork under the house. They too were full of water, which got dumped all over us as we cut them out.

On my third day, I got a battlefield promotion of sorts to lead a damage assessment strike team, since I was the only one on our team who was 'Palantir' computer trained which is required to do the assessments. (Palantir was a program used to find Osama Bin Laden) The data gathered on the work we do translates into a boat load of FEMA funds for the affected communities.

OK, so much for last month's deployment. I am not a disaster junkie, craving to go from one to the next endlessly. Wanting to help but unable to save the world single handedly, I have limited myself to two deployments a year. This month I was asked once again to deploy to Northern California to the fire ravaged areas, to Houston to help with the re-building of 100 homes after last year's disaster there, and to Mexico Beach, Florida, ground zero where hurricane 'Michael' wiped that town off the map. Unable to be in 3 places at once, Florida was it, so off I went to 'Operation Amberjack'. 

These folks were having a little trouble reaching their front door

As far as accommodations are concerned, it is best to have low expectations. We were housed in what was a school before hurricane ‘Michael’ had its way with it. It is now a gutted warehouse with all the charm of the inside of a dumpster, and where all 96 of us men and women on this OP slept in the same room the size of a gymnasium. On few nights the outside temperature dipped to 32 degrees and our building was unheated. As best I could figure, my cot was located between the second and third rows of desks in what had been Mrs. Johnson's 3^rd grade classroom.

Words simply fail to describe the level of devastation I saw in this area. I have posted many pics here but it is not the same as seeing it on both sides of the road as you drive for miles on end. I was expecting things to be bad but this was much worse than I thought possible.

Within a 50-mile radius, there were hundreds of thousands of 30 to 50 foot trees that were all snapped like tooth pics at about shoulder height and laying on their side. Everybody’s trees were in their neighbors' yard. In Mexico Beach (ground zero), homes within the first 3 streets of the beach were nowhere to be seen. Only concrete slabs and debris remained. They had simply exploded and parts and pieces either flew in the surrounding neighborhood, in the forest nearby or out to sea.

Further in, most homes were heavily damaged, knocked off their foundations, some laying on their side, some IN the local creek while others stood 8 feet tall as the rooms of the house had simply collapsed under the roof. I saw bed mattresses and clothes imbedded in trees a half mile from any home and metal roofing wrapped completely around a tree. I simply can't see how the place can ever recover. I saw less devastation in Bosnia after a war there. 

The place got hit pretty hard with 155 MPH winds (250 KM) (2 MPH below a category 5 hurricane) and 3000 homes and businesses were destroyed. Unlike North Carolina where homes got flooded, these homes became piles of toothpicks. In many cases the only thing still recognizable were the cement foundations.

Below, I will include a number of pics, perhaps more than you are interested in seeing. I took them, so I thought I would simply make them available.

 Home away from home with 95 other people in the same room

 Mexico Beach. All homes on first 3 streets.... gone.

 I got this picture online but I walked around this house on Mexico Beach

 This was my crew with homeowners we helped

 Himself, tearing out a ceiling.

 A home we worked on

 Metal roofing wrapped around a tree in 155 MPH winds

 Marina boat storage building. All boats inside were destroyed.

 A 50 mile radius of trees were knocked down like these. The landscaping will not recover in our lifetime.

 "All good, family is OK, Business not"

 Last house my team worked on

 The ground floor is crushed under the roof

 Note the house on its side in the back. Another house was IN the canal

Ready for another deployment

November 2018

What happened?

I have been sending this out religiously for the past 14 years since I retired, always on the 15th of the month. This month was no exception, but I fear the internet gremlins got in the way, or my internet connection was not up to the task where I was at the time. (Me on the East coast all but incommunicado and Janice at home in California.)  I explained further below and in the event it did not go through, I am resending it to you again. Sorry.

The baby is home!

The baby of our family, 31 year old Cassie Anna came to visit with her guy Art and her 3 kids. 10 year old sweet Kayla Marie, 5 year old Ryan the terrible (who comes by his name honestly) and 18 month old puddle of love Lindy who we tried to hide in a dresser drawer when her mother returned home.

They flew in from Astoria, Oregon for a 10 day visit. This was a chance for Cassie to return to her family home and to show the area off to Art. While here, we took the kids to Disneyland, swimming at the beaches, our Monarch butterfly grove, our one of a kind farmers market ( part carnival, part street fair to have our faces painted) and of course, gum alley. Then, for a break, we went on hay rides, worked our way through a hay maze, walked through a petting zoo, picked pumpkins and visited a haunted house.

Gum alley

This is a must see tourist attraction for kids. Started by students after WWII, it covers two walls of the alley 15 feet high and 70 feet long with well over a million pieces of chewing gum. Seen by some as 'disgusting' and others as unique art, no kid walks by without leaving his contribution. Meanwhile, Cassie and Art got some serious grown up time together without the little darlings.

Our play area where their mother used to play

Surf's up, dude.

Nap time for the girls

Disneyland submarine ride 

Farmers market. "Lord of the electric cello"

The kids loved our local Monarch butterfly grove.

Team Rubicon

When we first married and the kids were young, I spent a year volunteering to build our new church. We were on the tail end of building our house and it seemed like the right thing to do. On week-ends Janice would hold the fort with the 3 kids we had at the time, to free me to show up and help other church members frame the building. I also ran the tractor we owned to help prepare the grading for the site. Much like Janice and I did for our homes, our church scraped up all the money it could and spent it all on materials, leaving very little for labor. The upside was that we got far more homes (and church) for the money. The downside was that we had to build them ourselves.

As to the building of our church, I can remember the day we had to bore five 30” wide, 20-foot-deep caissons. [A caisson is a deep hole bored with a drilling rig for the purpose of filling it with concrete and steel rebar to provide a foundation for a building that is on a hillside or on some type of ‘problem’ soil]

As the huge drill bit was pulled out of each hole, some dirt would fall back into the bottom. Since the hole had to be ‘clean’ before filling it with concrete, this loose soil at the bottom had to be removed. There was no way to remove it but to get someone to go down with a bucket to scoop it up and have the bucket pulled to the surface. The problem was, the hole was barely as wide as your shoulders so even if someone was lowered down, it would not be wide enough to crouch down to get at the loose dirt.

The solution, I brilliantly thought, was to tie someone’s feet securely and lower him upside down with the crane so that he could get at the loose soil at the bottom, then cover his face with a cloth as the bucket was pulled up not to have dirt fall onto his face, eyes and nose. We needed a volunteer that was young, dumb, heavily insured, easily replaced and wouldn’t be missed. I was unanimously chosen.

Later, I led a Royal Ranger troop for a year. (A church affiliated Boy Scout Troop) I organized places to visit and experiences they would never have had, culminating with a presentation by Jeana Yeager of an award for 3 of the boys to attend Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama. [Jeana Yeager co-piloted, along with Dick Rutan, the first non-stop, non-refueled, 9-day flight around the world in the Voyager aircraft in 1986. She was the recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Ronald Reagan]

Stay with me here, as there is a point to all this chest puffing. When I retired in 2004, we embarked on Pee-Wee’s big adventure traveling from home to home, and it seemed impractical to do anything hands on, so we began financially supporting charitable causes in a more serious way. We have always tithed in traditional ways supporting our church, but we went rogue too, by funding over 100 cleft palate surgeries for children though an organization called ‘Smile Train’. We support clean water projects through an organization call ‘Charity Water’ and make micro loans through ‘Kiva’ for entrepreneurs around the world trying to get on their feet. Later, we became serious supporters of "Doctors Without Borders", "Tunnel To Towers" and an orphanage in Vietnam. There are hundreds of worthwhile causes and charities but we picked a few where we are trying to have an impact.

That said, I was still frustrated and felt that something was missing. It felt that I was practicing my faith like a city cowboy (all hat, no cattle). Or, like the French say, “Like a crocodile” (big mouth, little hands). For years after I retired, I looked for some way I could express my faith through a practical service of some kind. I contacted the Red Cross but there was nothing that could be made to work. I worked with ‘Habitat for Humanity’, but the homes they were building were far from where we lived. I contacted ‘Doctors Without Borders’ and other emergency rescue type organizations, but aside from my not being a doctor I thought I could help with some aspect of logistics and organization. No dice. Then, when I got my pilot's license, I hoped that there would be some way I could tie that into some service. Nada. Each time the issue was the same; our moving about every 4 months precluded getting involved with anything with any continuity.

Then it happened. I saw a story about a volunteer organization called ‘Team Rubicon’. They are comprised largely of ex-military folks like myself and what they officially refer to as ‘ass kicking civilians who want to get shit done’. With a tag line of "We do disasters", I thought 'what's not to love'? What they do, simply put, is to deploy after a disaster (think Katrina, Puerto Rico, Houston or my namesake Michael) in recovery strike teams, critically needed to help the shell-shocked victims in the weeks preceding the national guard, FEMA or other charitable organizations showing up. 

This is not some schlocky outfit on their first rodeo. They respond with millions of dollars of equipment, or ‘weapons of mass construction’ as they refer to it, their own food preparation trailers and tractor trailer mounted bathrooms for their volunteers to be self-sufficient and avoid needing any local resources. This touched on my skill set and interests perfectly. Construction/ destruction, organization and logistics. Just like flying, I was made for this. Had I known of this organization I would have been all in for the past 8 years. Better late than never, I guess.

Last summer I started to take the FEMA training (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and recently got certified. I then became a member of a Team Rubicon recovery strike team who spend a week or two on scene until the reinforcements arrive to take over to help rebuild. We are not part of FEMA but do take their training and are certified by them.

Our tasks typically are to do things like cover roofs with tarps to minimize additional rain damage to homes in the first days, cut trees to clear roads in the suburbs, move tons of debris in outlying areas further down the food chain for overwhelmed authorities so that people can get back into their homes. Homeowners are never charged for the service. 

What do we do? See the video here 

How bad is it? Well, it is hard to get your head around the 3-punch blow so many people suffer as seen below. They lose their homes, find that their community is in tatters, then realize that they no longer have a job to return to, to recover.

So, this is what is left of my house. I guess I will...

simply walk through my neighborhood to...

        

my job.

We see a big disaster unfold on TV and we follow the story for several days until something new and more interesting comes along. Like Trump Making America Great Again or something. Meanwhile, these people are still in the same place with no home, community or job to go back to. Their recovery will go on for months or years. Soon, another disaster will catch our interest and we forget all about them.

I now keep a pre-packed ‘go’ bag in my closet(s) and I am ready to board a flight to anywhere in North America on a moment’s notice when deployed. The next time a serious disaster unfolds somewhere in the US or Canada, I expect to be there, unless we are in Europe at the time. Then again, I am on the international team also. Team Rubicon provides air transportation, accommodations, and feeds you. An alternative Christian sister organization is called ‘8 Days of Hope’. They refer to their volunteers in a more sensitive politically correct manner.

This is my first deployment, so I am writing this from Operation Silver Sun, in New Bern, North Carolina. Hurricane Florence hit here recently, killing 32 people and cutting the town off from the outside world with all the flooding. It has been pretty physically demanding work so I don’t expect I will be able to do this for much more than 20 years. Food and transportation were fine. ‘Accommodations’ were provided also if you don’t take the term too seriously or literally. Mine consists of a thin mattress and sleeping bag in the firehouse exercise room. It is far more than many of the folks we are trying to help have. I am scheduled to return home by the weekend. Teams are deployed in 'waves', each lasting a week. Ours consisted of 67 people broken down in 6 person strike teams. I was not deployed earlier because we had family visiting. I will have more to say on all of this next month when this is over.

Isn’t it great being retired?You get to do exactly what you want to do, whenever you want. God is good.

Care to join me?

The roof

Last month I wrote that we were having our roof re-done. It was a whirlwind of activity but with a crew of up to 9 people, it was done in a jiffy. The irony did not escape me that the roof I installed 34 years ago lasted 29 years and only had to be replaced when woodpeckers had their way with it, but the one done by 'professionals' had to be replaced after 5 years.

Remnants from hurricane Michael? No, our roof project underway.

When the roofing was stripped last month, a message hidden for 34 years was revealed for only the 3rd time. The first time when I built the house, once when it was reroofed 5 years ago and again this month. I  put the 25 foot high message up for Valentine's day when we were under construction so Janice could see it from the freeway 1 mile away while driving home.

  Roofers wondering.... what the....?

My favorite mother in law and herself.

Humpty Dumpty put back together again.