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.
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
