Goodbye Hector, Kentucky & The Importance of Hot Shots

I lost my wingman; Thursday was Hector’s last day. He flew home on Friday.  I’ll miss working with him we made a good team. He lacked nothing in the compassion department. Seeing all the Appalachian poverty weighed as heavy on his heart as the devastation we saw each day. When you put the two together it is heartbreaking. The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky said 1722 homes were destroyed and 3,986 were partially destroyed.

Destroyed in the hollow

I talked to a number of people who lived in hollows or bottoms and drove or ran to higher ground above their homes only to watch those homes swept downstream.

As if the flood wasn’t enough there were also fires

As I’ve said before these people amaze me. Even with the enormity of uncertainty they face, they’ll ask you where you’re from, relate that to someone they know there, or a good time they spent there themselves.  It seems they’d rather ask you about your life than burden you with what just happened to theirs. Though, if you happen to look upon them before you’re noticed you can see it in their faces, as they look upon a foundation that once supported a home or gather cement blocks, bricks, pieces of wood, stacking them neatly, giving themselves at least some feeling of structure or control.

Everything in the debris

This past week there have been large shovels, cranes and backhoes down in the larger streams removing homes, pieces of homes, cars, trucks, ATVs and about everything else that could be washed downstream, loading it all on big trucks to be hauled away. You see everything from coolers to kids’ wading pools, at heights in the trees you can’t believe. I can’t help but shutter when I think about what else they might find amongst the debris.

I was supposed to go home on the 1^st but extended to the 6^th. They would like to turn the DR over to regional control by the 9^th.

On Wednesday Hector and I took James, one of our spiritual aid workers, along with us. Spiritual aid workers don’t preach or push religion, but rather try to feel out a person’s beliefs or means to cope with the ups and downs in life and support them in that effort. I saw him comment that he liked a religious sweatshirt a woman was wearing, using that as an inroad to encourage her to embrace her faith. The Red Cross also has mental health workers. Both often go out with us, as well as the feeding and distribution teams. It gives them face time with those touched by the disaster. People are more likely to accept that type of help when it is at hand than ask for it.

Saving Turtles

In Florida, Hector and his wife do Tortoise rescue, they save Tortoises from construction sites, tag them and relocate them to places where they are safe. Not Tortoises, but we probably saved 4 painted turtles we took from the middle of mountain roads and placed them on the side of the road in the direction they seemed to be headed. I don’t know if it was the flood or the time of year that set them on their journey.

Hector’s last day was a good one, we found every address we were assigned. We were about to give up on one when Hector spotted a garbage can with the number we were looking for on it and way down in a gully below was a mobile home resting sideways in the brush.

Gas prices are weird down here, I’ve seen them from $3.12 per gallon to 3.79, often at the same time and I wonder, why would someone pay $3.79 PG when they could get it for 3.12 just up the street? On Thursday morning it was 3.79 at the same gas station we got it for 3.12 the morning before.  I thought, “oh it’s the holiday” then when we passed the same gas station that evening it was down to 3.19.

I think most peoples’ second vehicle here is a “side by Side” or ATV. You rarely see a home without at least one, with some of the roads here it is understandable. You’re often confronted with one roaring down the road at you.

The two days following Hector’s departure I worked with Pam from Wisconsin one day and Diana of Brownsville, Texas the next two. Worked well with both, but had the most fun with Diana who had a good since of humor and seemed to appreciate mine, also working two days together we got to know each other better.

Yesterday we saw how important hot shots and a second look can be. We had one guy flag us down to tell us his house had considerable damage but was assessed at “no visible damage.” He said he had contacted our supervisor who told him someone would come out and reassess it, but he had yet to see anyone. So, we followed him up a long drive which had a locked gate. As he said there was indeed considerable damage evidenced by a waterline showing there had been at least 4 feet of water in the house. I’m sure what happened with the original assessment was, that it was done from the road quite a way from the house, as the locked gate prevented the original assessors from getting closer. From that distance the house didn’t appear to be damaged and the fact it was sitting on high ground seemed to support that assumption. You had to look behind the house to see where the flood waters came down the mountain. The last house we assessed that day was a similar story, it looked like it had minor damage from the front but when I took a closer, I could see quite a bit of day light coming from the back. Peering through with window I saw the whole back wall was gone. Walking around back, which wasn’t an easy climb up a hill I saw that a mudslide had pushed the whole rear wall in.

Today, my last day, I worked with Dennis from Madison Wisconsin. They wanted us to do at least a few assessments before driving to Lexington where we would spend the night and fly out in the morning. We found all our addresses, though on the first one our GPS sent us on a wild goose chase up some narrow road which went from paved to gravel to dirt them a total wash out only to turn around then direct us on the true route. Sometimes I think some nerd who suffered too many wedgies in high school, maps out a bogus departure from true route that takes bewildered travelers by his house hoping he might someday catch and get even with one of the bullies that brought him so much distress.

Mountain Mist

I know Dennis gave some local guys a big laugh today as he carefully “snailed” our way by their pickup on a narrow mountain road where, I swear, at least one tread of the tires on my side of the car was edging the deep drop below. I’m certain by the windshield full of smiles facing our windshield of wide eyes, we brought them some joy and will no doubt be subject of matter at the bar or around the kitchen table this evening.

I can’t believe how fast last week went by, yet last Monday and our fateful search for the lost address on Hwy 577 seems ages ago.

I was going to list all the additional bergs I went to beyond the ones I mentioned earlier but found, from Booneville to Gays Creek there were just far too many

The Hot Shot team minus Hector

I will leave this DR, as I always do with light and dark memories, having learned something about the world, myself, and finding hope in that there are still people who can leave their differences behind and come together for a common good.

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The Saga of Hwy 577, and a New Week

I had a good rest on my day off. I was looking forward to getting out and doing some assessments on Monday. Hector and I were assigned an address two and a half hours away in Tyner. It was the most distant address assigned. It was supposed to be on Highway 577. Everything about this address was wrong. First of all, Hwy 577 was like a snake that had fell victim to a lawnmower. It had sections in three different counties, none of them connected. And no section of it was in Tyner, although the Tyner post office did deliver mail to a small stretch of it.  We spent three hours searching for the address, we covered the length of each section of 577 and never found it. We’d get excited when the numbers seemed to be getting close, only to find the next number, too high or too low. I suspect if there was such an address it may have been in a stretch that had no numbers on the houses, and where there were mailboxes, they lacked any kind of identifying number. When we asked someone about the address, we got that familiar, “what’s the name?” Which, of course, we didn’t have, and they couldn’t understand why we would not. Feeling defeated we finally gave up and drove back, frustrated that we had wasted a whole day. Tuesday was just the opposite we immediately found every address on our list. I had to find an old letter lying on the porch to confirm one of them, but we found every address we were assigned, and even got back early.

Is Google messing with us?

We spent at least a half hour on a stretch of dirt road, often questioning whether Google maps was playing games with us. It was a beautiful drive, deep in the forest, full of curves, hills, deep gullies and miles without house in sight, surprisingly in the end, we came out on the road we were supposed to. Other than our trek through the deep woods most our travels were to areas we had been before, only different addresses.

One of our addresses was on a short road, or as it is called, a “Bottom,” fittingly in a low area below the main road next to a creek, there were 2 foundations where the homes had been completely washed away, and one house that had been moved and torn up pretty bad, and a large barn that had survived. There was a man in his 60s or 70s on a tractor who drove up to talk to us. He said the address we were looking for was his son’s and pointed to one of the foundations. He said the home had been washed down stream. He told us on the morning of the flood his son went to the horse barn and let the horses, who all survived, out. The water was rising so quickly he had to climb up into the barn’s rafters to save himself, while, about 50 yards away, his house was being torn from its foundation and washed downstream. The father’s home was also gone. He said his truck and a lot of his farm equipment was still in the river. He had pulled two of his horse trailers out and lost another. He had also lost an ATV which he hadn’t found. With all this he said he was fortunate as three of his neighbors were lost, a mother and her two daughters who were in their 20s. So far, they’ve only found the mother. He said his son was now in the hospital. He cut his leg on a piece of metal while pulling stuff from the creek and it became infected. After all that happened to this man and his family, his positive attitude amazed me. The resilience of these people is astounding He asked me where I was from and said he sends horses up to Michigan. He raises racehorses.

A mudslide almost pushed this home down the Mountain

Last week Hector and I assessed some houses that rather than being damaged by the rising waters was damaged from water and mud rushing down the mountain behind them. We had a very steep climb to get to one such house. We drove as far as our 4-wheel drive would get us and hiked the rest of the way, where we found a house, a mudslide had almost pushed off its mountain perch.  We also assessed a home on a road where several homes’ trouble started with the flooding, followed by fire caused by some kind of short or power-surge. All of them were completely destroyed.

I think some of us see or read about these disasters in the news and think, “Why do those people live there,” assuming that this kind of flooding is common. Let me tell you, it is not. The victims of this flood nor their parents or grandparents have ever seen this kind of flooding. They never imagined that pretty little creek near their home could rise to 30 feet of raging water, no more than you could imagine it happening to similar waters near you.

Can you believe this small stream had enough water to move this doublewide a half of football field?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the flood waters that caused this damage did not come from big rivers like the Kentucky, Cumberland or Big Sandy, they may rise some but can handle the water. It is ditches, streams, creeks, and rivers no larger than the Flint River, that runs through Lapeer County where I grew up, or the Macatawa (Black) river on the west side of the state near where I live now. The damage is done by the surge of too much water in the small tributaries trying to get to the big rivers.

The Mountains

I don’t know why I’ve never thought about visiting Kentucky, especially when I owned a Harley. The beauty of these mountains is stunning, I know that beauty, and the strength exemplified by the people who live here are big factors aiding my ability to deal with the tragedy I see each day.