Soooo... what did you do for Christmas?
Me? Well 4 days after we arrived back in California, I deployed with Team Rubicon, so I grabbed my GO bag and headed to the airport. I joined a flood recovery strike team to conduct an emergency disaster response operation in Sumas Washington. This was to assist in recovery efforts due to recent severe storms causing floods, landslides and mudslides.
The scene, shortly before we arrived.
It's been two years since my last deployment due to the whole COVID 19 issue. Finally cleared, I spent 8 days over Christmas in the freezing cold weather where we would typically tarp roofs and remove debris from inundated homes.
The thing is that once I got there, I got a battlefield promotion of sorts and was assigned to do more of the operations organizing than to actually crawl through the wet muck in a rubber duck suit (we refer to it as going swimming) under mobile homes to remove wet insulation and water filled ductwork to reconnect the furnaces. I still managed to get my gray shirt dirty when all 23 of us gutted a house on Christmas day. The weather was absolutely hideous with freezing blowing snow while we worked in a community that was six city blocks from the Canadian border.
The road I am standing on is in the State of Washington, USA. The road 10 feet (3M) on the other side of the barrier is a parallel road in the Province of British Columbia, Canada. The waist high barrier is the high security fence to prevent the Canadian hordes from invading us. The Canadian Rockies are in the background.This is my yearly reminder of just how bloody blessed my life is, how grateful I am and how great it was to return to California and soak in our hot tub.
Working in a flood zone can be deceiving and misleading. As we drove through this no name town out in the middle of nowhere, at first blush it appeared relatively intact. That is until you noticed the high watermark at about the 5 foot level on the front door of homes. That’s when you realize that everything below it inside the house has to get torn out and taken to the curb for the city to haul to the dump. Furniture, appliances, cabinets, clothes, drywall and insulation …absolutely everything including your car.
Just when you think you’ll just go back to work and start all over from scratch, you look around and realize that every business in your community, your police and fire department, your grocery store, the restaurant, the pharmacy are all gone. You are walking through a ghost town and might as well be walking on the face of the moon.
A friend asked if we were put up in hotels while we were there. Ha! It was flooded out too! Our team stayed in a local church that had suffered some damage but was dry when we got there. I was in room 46, or at least that was the number on the Red Cross cot I was assigned in the co-ed open bay with everyone else.
The watermark on the pew shows the flood level in the church where we stayed
It is hard to keep harping about each disaster I have worked on. How much worse can total destruction get? The flooded areas in North Carolina, the hurricane damage I worked on in Florida or the total devastation I experienced in the Bahamas all kind of look alike after a while and the work we do is much the same. Removing mountains of debris, clearing trees off of roads and tarping roofs is our bread and butter.
Some say that no good deed goes un punished, so I brought back a gift with me. COVID. I tested positive as soon as I got off the plane when I came home so I spent the next 13 days quarantined in the trailer on our property that our granddaughter recently vacated before SHE, who MUST be obeyed would let me back in the house after I produced a Covid negative test. Christmas gutting a house, New Years quarantined in a trailer. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
This is only my 4th deployment with TR, even though I was asked to go to many parts of the country when we were in Europe which of course, while we were there, was not possible. Just like making a donation to a political party ensures you being on their mailing list forever, being a FEMA trained disaster responder guarantees they will come back to you time and time again.
I had to hurry up and get better because no sooner did I begin my quarantine, I got a message that I was being redeployed at the end of January to Mayfield Kentucky, ground zero for all the tornado damage. They want to get as much out of me as they can before we go back to Europe … assuming that the border is still open.
The Bee does it again
The state of New York just released a new promotional video to promote itself for the upcoming summer tourist season. The video is called "Life On The River in the Thousand Islands" as part of their "I Love Upstate New York" series and it was released on Facebook for maximum effect. The video showcases about 40 or so iconic island properties in snapshot portraits. Much to our pleasant surprise, a friend sent us the link and Honey Bee Island is the 3rd property shown at the very beginning of this montage. The video is well done and if you are curious you can see it HERE. Be sure to click on the full screen view.
Moving UP!!
Daughter Kami got on the property ladder this month by buying her first home in New Orleans. Finn (her dog) would say that he bought it and will let her live with him in it. This is a 'shotgun' house, as in a duplex with half occupied by her and she will rent out the other half allowing someone else to slowly pay off her mortgage. She is already putting a 'To Do' list for dad and mom to come out and get busy fixing the niggly bits that they know a little something about... just as soon as we get back from Europe.
The times, they are a changing
We are in the mist of moving Janice's mom (AKA the world's best mother in law as anyone else has to be a distant 2nd) from her retirement home nearby to our daughter's property in Astoria Oregon. At 98, Sweetie Pie, as she has always been known by the family, could use a little more one on one. Cassie and her husband Art jumped at the chance at putting a unit on their property and having her nearby but giving her all the privacy she wants. Still, its a big change and we are negotiating all the transition changes that it entails. It will keep us busy until our departure mid February.
