December, 2022

 

Honey, were home!

We returned home from our cross country trip to be greeted by our daughter Mandy and husband Markus who had been holding up in the house for a week prior to our arrival. We then spent the next two weeks having all 4 of us catering to the whims of himself...our little grandson. It was super having them all home with us.

Down time

You know how we are always told that the most dangerous area for folks in their house is the bathroom? Well, I momentarily forgot that, slipped coming out of the shower and landed on my back on the corner of a tile step. After laying there for 10 minutes I decided to crawl on my knees. After a quick trip to the hospital for an ultrasound, X-rays and a Cat Scan which revealed no permanent damage to the spleen and liver, I was sent home all drugged up to lay in bed for a week. Slipping in the shower accounts for 70 deaths per year, proving yet again that I am bulletproof.  Having recovered from what was no worse than my plane crash, I was off to Santa Barbara for two days of training with Team Rubicon.

 

For the past two years I have been trying to get trained as a sawyer for Team Rubicon. Sawyers are the guys who generally are the first called out on deployments after a disaster as in most cases trees have toppled all over the place, blocking roads, access to all services as well as to homes. Fire, police and ambulances can hardly respond if there are trees blocking the roads. Sawyers make short work of all that. It was all but impossible to sign up as each time a class was offered we were in France or at the island. When at the island the class was offered in California. Grrrrr! I have operated a chainsaw for decades so it seemed a little insulting to think I would need 2 days to learn how to do it right. But for safety, liability and for sheer competence on how to maintain and repair the equipment out in the field on your own, the training hit the spot. 

The conditions were simply hideous. We had to climb a mile up a steep mountain in the pouring rain, fog and freezing cold with mud up to our ankles with all our equipment (helmet, chaps, blood stop kit, gas, oil, tools and or course a chainsaw) to the cut site. The difficult conditions were on purpose, the thinking being that if anyone could not work under those conditions, they might not make it in a disaster zone either.

I left a professional, fully licensed, certified and trained Team Rubicon sawyer. Have saw, will travel.

                                                   

 

Florida, again.

5 days after my sawyer training I was deployed to Fort Myers, and Sanibel Island, ground zero where Hurricane Ian hit in October. This disaster is old news, except for the folks who are up to their eyeballs in debris or their roofs are open to the sky.

Ironically, this is my 3rd deployment to the sunshine state which if I didn't know better, seems to be disaster prone. I was first sent in 2019 to Mexico beach in the panhandle (North West corner of the state), after my namesake hurricane Michael blew the place out of existence. This past October I was sent to Daytona Beach (mid state) for flood mitigation and now to Ft. Myers (all the way south). We quickly forget that this was the 5th worse hurricane to hit the US with 155 MPH winds, nearly 100 people died and caused  $100 Billion of damage.  This is my 7th deployment and surely my last of the year as we slowly prepare to make our way to France.

The week was spent tarping roofs and doing muck outs.  We were housed in an enclosed compound with 24 hour armed security in FEMA disaster tractor trailers that had 5 'pods' or rooms in each with 6 submarine type bunk beds (3 high) in each 'pod'. With 20 such tractor trailers, 600 people could be accommodated although we were not even close to that number. Other tractor trailers were mobile kitchens, shower, laundry and bathroom trailers Entire trailers were generators.

The location was a very pretty county park with the only admonitions was to stay away from the pond in the morning and at night because of the alligators.  I have written extensively in the past about what we do on these deployments but it is still amusing to hear people say "Oh that happened a while ago so I guess everything is back to normal now". As if. I have posted many pictures in the past but as reminder I offer these few. I could post a hundred more.

Our 'pods' inside the trailer

"Clean up on aisle 4"

One unusual thing that happened was that ROKU was filming a 13 episode special documentary on Team Rubicon which will air in May. Shortly thereafter Netflix is supposed to buy the rights to it. As a results they spent the week imbedded with different teams each day and an entire day with my strike team.  The hope is that this will make the work we do much higher profile and help with corporate donations to support the effort. I am in negotiations with either Tom Cruise or Brad Pit to play me in the movie sequel that will surely follow.

My buddy awaits his travel orders

And the winner is....

Ok, so Janice found and we bought a new car this month. It is a Hyundai Santa Cruz SEL Premium Turbo AWD. Now that's a mouthful! We drove our 17 year old pick up (almost as old as me!) across the country to sell it here in California, buy a new vehicle to drive it back to the island in January before hoping over the pond to France. Once again, we will visit family and friends along the way and mooch off all of them. The irony is not lost on us that all 3 of our vehicles are Hyundai's so I guess we are consistent in what we like. Two of them are all but identical, although a continent apart, but this one needed to be part pick up to transport gasoline for the boats and jet ski at the island. Janice is super sensitive to the fuel odor even in the trunk of a sedan.

This is the 3rd vehicle we have replaced in two years so we are probably done for a while. One thing for sure is that we are out of money.

Free money!!

The city of San Francisco recently launched a guaranteed income program aimed at the transgender community. The Guaranteed Income for Transgender People, or GIFT, pilot program will provide $1,200 per month for 18 months, as well as healthcare and financial coaching. GIFT is one of several guaranteed basic income pilot programs ongoing in San Francisco.

The Abundant Birth Project, launched in 2020, is providing pregnant Black and Pacific Islander residents with $1,000 per month, from their first trimester to two years postpartum. The Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists, launched in 2021, is providing 190 artists with $1,000 per month for 18 months. The program is open to anyone who self identifies as transgender (any one of 95 self selected sexual identifiers) [Self pollinator or Houtoo man anyone?]  with no proof or verification of any kind so all you have to do is submit your application.

You can apply here:

https://www.giftincome.org/_files/ugd/40a234_fa065a88cf9b481bbae6e47c5598270c.pdf 

The Epistle: We report, you decide.

                                                                        Only a friend...

November, 2022

Having returned from deployment, I thought it was important to begin to groom my eventual replacement, my grandson. The man must dress the part.

On the road again....

Well the season is over and we have left the island for the next 7 months. When they make me King, we will have a new calendar with more months in it. Also the seasons will change. Summer will start June 1 and end October 1 as it will suit my lifestyle better. Fall would go clear to May 1 and Winter would last a month. I want sun, not cold. If I wanted cold, I would have been an Eskimo. Why do you think I left Canada in my rear view mirror?

So off we went, on a 3 week+ cross country trip back home to California via the most circuitous route possible to see family and friends along the way, mooching off all of them. As I write, we are a day out from home, now in the great state of California having covered more than 4500 miles (7,000 + km). We love road trips and we have criss-crossed the US and Canada a dozen times over the years, most often with the kids, having taken them to 48 states, 3 provinces and Mexico. And that was before we took them to Europe. There is so much to see and experience along the way. Being in no hurry (the only things left that I still HAVE to do is pay taxes and die) we now limit ourselves to driving 5 hours a day to have time to visit anything we see.

Along the way, we stopped for a few days to visit family in Nebraska on the family farm that grows corn, soybeans and also has cattle. I rode a combine and drove a tractor towing a 1000 bushels of corn kernels until I got a blowout on a 6' tall (2 m) $2000 tire. The farm is absolutely staggeringly enormous by any standard, harvesting fields that go as far as the eye can see.

OOOOPS...

As viewed from the cab of the combine... as far as the eye can see

Look at the size of the men next to the combine. The tractor and grain cart I drove is next to it

Wind down after a day of harvesting

Janice's cousin Cinde

                    Later, we visited the original "Pony Express" station 

Then, we drove to "Wind Cave" National Park. Over the years we have visited  over a dozen caves all over the US and Europe. They are all so different and fascinating. This one is the 7th longest in the world with tentacles that go every which way at different levels. They have currently mapped 262 miles of  passageways and with geologists still exploring as we visited, it is estimated that they have only mapped 5% of the whole cave.

The map showing the mare's nest of passages

You can't go to South Dakota without driving by Mt. Rushmore. It's pretty Iconic. Then again, 10 miles away is the carving of "Crazy Horse" in a mountain on Lakota Indian lands. It is 10 times the size of Mt. Rushmore, was started in 1949 and is likely to take 100 years or more to finish. As seen below, they are currently working on his arm which is 261 feet long (120 M) The crane is over the area where his horse will be. We have visited about every 10 years to check on the progress.

The proposed finished product

Once past South Dakota, we drove through Wyoming's Big Horn mountains. At first, it was really pretty.

But, in a matter of 30 minutes we found ourselves in a total whiteout with temperatures dropping 30 degrees. There were no vehicles for almost 30 miles, so we drove at 25-30 MPH on our summer tires with only snow plow markers on each side of the road to guide us. The snow covered road was indistinguishable from the adjacent fields.

.

Our view of the road ahead. Look closely, you can barely see the markers

As we reached the valley below, we were forced to stop on the road to let a large moose walk across.

Back on the road, we drove through Montana to visit our grandson Alex and his fiancée Caitlin who are scheduled to get married in the months to come.

Our next stop was in Spirit Lake, Idaho, to visit son Wesley and Amanda for a few days. When we left the island, we knew we would be driving back to California in the fall, but we never expected to be driving in snow and such cold. The coldest we got was 14 degrees F (-10C) but other than the whiteout conditions on the road in Wyoming, in Idaho we got caught in a 10" snowstorm. Crimeny!

Making our way to the west coast through Washington state, we drove south to Oregon to daughter Cassie's family for several days. There, we saw the whole fam damnly from Janice's mom to Lindy and all in between. From there we are making a beeline for the house to arrive November 16th after nearly a month on the road.

October, 2022

 

Team Rubicon

Operation Appalation Spirit

After action report

A disastrous month in review

Thanks to Janice being willing to hold down the fort on her own, I got to go spend a week in Kentucky playing in the mud. Floods all look alike after a while. No, I don't mean to minimize it but there are so many similarities. Water, water, water everywhere. Debris, damage, lifetimes of work, mementos and souvenirs lost forever. It is always so heart breaking. The county we were deployed to has an extremely high social vulnerability index number. Simply put, it is one of the poorest areas of the country with little ability to ever recover or rebuild as the average family income is $21,000 a year and has not a penny of insurance. We are never sent to wealthy communities as they have money and insurance and are back on their feet in little time. Many here are coal miners that the government is making a herculean effort to put out of business.

Florida? No Kentucky. In the end, they all look alike, Everything you own... appliances, clothes, furniture, even your car is dragged to the curb to be taken to the dump. 

Meanwhile your walls are full of water

A day at the office. Some of the homes did not even have studs in the walls. The interior was coved with thin stapled Masonite type material. When removed, there were boards that if you leaned against you would fall though the wall to the exterior.

                 Where does it all go?  Debris fills the local creeks and river for miles

Travel is slow going

Hey, this is Kentucky after all!

Anheuser Busch donated hundreds of cased of drinking water to Team Rubicon but we had to stop taking them out in the field as some people called to complain that they thought our teams were drinking beer while working.

One of the tasks I was given was to drive a trailer of our equipment to our warehouse in Cincinnati Ohio to pre-position it to respond to Hurricane Dorian.

Morning Brief. We had up to 102 people on our wave, housed in a Veterans of Foreign Wars bingo hall (where I was), the local firehouse and the American Legion Hall

The strike team I joined

No sooner was I home than I got a 6 hour notice to fly to Puerto Ricco to help with damage from hurricane Dorian. A half hour later, 'GO' bag by the door, I was informed to 'stand down' as they were using volunteers that had not just returned from deployment. Whew! We would have had to leave the island at 2 AM to arrive at the airport for my 6 AM flight.

I know that last month I wrote that I was done for the year unless something else happened. But then.... hurricane Ian hit and we were on once again. 

Operation

Sunshine Strong

Type 3 Hurricane

Valusia Co. Florida

(Daytona Beach)

You have to have been living in a cave not to know or have seen all of the devastation that Florida endured during this Cat 4+ hurricane. The hurricanes do what they do and we show up and do what we do. As was the case, I got notified to get on the plane and head to Florida. Accommodations were the best I have ever seen, but still not not 5 star. It's still a Red Cross cot. Perfect! Where do I sign up? If I am not careful, I could become a disaster junkie :) 

Once again, the love of my life sent me off with an encouraging smile knowing perfectly well that she had to hold down the fort on her own. This time I was deployed to Valusia county Florida (North east of Orlando). As far as I know, in all of Team Rubicon's history they have always set up in one area or town for one operation after a disaster. Here, they have set up 5 separate operations in different parts of the state as the damage and destruction was so widespread. Meanwhile, we still had a team in Puerto Rico from hurricane Fiona.

A Team Rubicon strike team tarping a roof and removing debris from a house

My first task was to fly to West Palm Beach to pick up one of 12 trucks of supplies to take to our base in Daytona Beach. Then it was time to get busy. It had been a week since the hurricane, so naturally it was out of the news with everyone figuring it was 'all over' and moved on to the news stories of the day. The fact is, they had barely recovered all the bodies down south in that time. Florida, being quite flat, takes a long time for the biblical amount of water from the hurricane to make its way to the ocean. As a result, towns that had suffered damage but not destroyed, suddenly found themselves between the sea and all the water that was draining out. Result? Flooding that they thought they had escaped. We were there to help clean up the mess.

This one was quite different than what I was accustomed to. Driving into Daytona Beach, I couldn't see hardly any damage. Yes, all the large billboards and some business signs where blown away in the 100 MPH + winds but there was little other evidence of a 'disaster'. But driving down any of the residential side streets in the surrounding communities was a different story. The homes, by and large, looked fine. The sidewalks though, had branch debris 5 feet high and 6 feet wide the entire length of both sides of the streets. Some roofs, primarily mobile homes, had roof damage that let the rain water in and did a lot of damage. A number of enormous trees had fallen, some blocking homeowners access.

Some pockets of the communities were in low lying areas and got 3 inches to a foot or two of water in the homes. No, not the 4-6 feet of water like many flood areas I was deployed to in the past but 3 inches of water may leave the structure of the home intact but the net result is that all your flooring is ruined, water goes thru the drywall, wicks up the insulation and gets into your furniture and appliances. What do you do with it all? This.

Something that is not acknowledged nearly often enough is the fact that these deployments are two person teams. The ones that never get the credit or the glory are the wive's who are left behind, like mine. None of this is possible without her ongoing support and understanding.

Road trip!

No fall season here would be complete without a little leaf-peeping. So on a spectacularly sunny and mild day, my bride and I went to get lost on the back roads of upstate New York to Lake Placid. Along the way we went through the town of 'Fine' on highway 3 and began noticing a peculiar sight. Every 50 feet (17 M) on the side of the road was a smallish American flag with a laminated card on it. Occasionally the Flag was inserted in a combat boot. This was EVERY 50 feet along the road, through towns, in front of businesses and homes, attached to guardrails, along farm properties, wherever. The thing was that it went on and on and on.

For 25 miles. (40Km)

From the town of Fine to Cranberry Lake. Curious, we pulled over to see what it was all about. Sure enough, each card had the name of a fallen soldier, where he died and where he was from. It was quite moving but there were over 2600 of these along the road....

Over the years, I have come across a few other similar pictures

that I posted that have just left a lump in my throat, like these two.

This one just kills me and still takes my breath away

OK, now that I have regained my composure and caught my breath, this is what our leaf-peeping was all about

This months advice