THE EPISTLE: December 2018

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.