Bye bye Beaumont

I'm off to Hewitt this morning to see my folks.

It's been nice, Beaumont, but I gots ta go. I really hope the recovery here keeps moving. The people in Sabine and Bridge City are especially in my prayers.

I don't think I'll be doing any more disasters this year so I'm putting my FEMA shirts in mothballs. I can't wait to get home and hug my kids. The wife says that I'm going to need a jacket back home. I missed most of the nice Michigan early fall season. I have a taste for apples and venison.

Vaya con Dios...

Getting close to leaving

It's Friday!

Normally that means something, but on our schedule...who cares?

What it DOES mean is that tomorrow is my last work day here in Beaumont. It's been an interesting journey. I really have polished my FEMA skills and by accident have polished my leadership and management skills.

I hate being away from home. I get horribly homesick. I can't imagine what people who do this for 6 months at a time go through or what people serving in the military endure. I just did 30 days and I'm ready for home.

I do, however, love this work. Going one-on-one with people and helping them get their lives back in order in whatever small way is a heck of a way to earn a paycheck. If I were retired and rich, I'd do it for free. Since I'm neither of those things, I'll go ahead and cash those paychecks.

What I'll miss:

• Texans. They're unique, for sure. Some of the nicest, most down-to-earth people on earth. You gotta love the dialect.
• Cajun Food. I gar-on-tee.
• The pace. I love being busy, having a purpose, coordinating, thinking on my feet, getting to be creative...just knowing I'm doing something useful and important.

What I won't miss:

• Really nasty trailer parks
• Mean dogs
• Wearing a blue shirt with a target on the front.

I'm not done yet. I still have another town meeting to attend. Hopefully not too many torches and pitchforks.

More Ike Pictures

Ugh. Tired.

9 more days till I get home.

Please keep Ike victims in your thoughts. I searched the USA Today for any reference to Hurricane Ike today and didn't find it. I saw no news about Ike on CNN. One month ago you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting Jim Cantore.

I take that back. Bill Clinton and George Bush 41 are photo op-ing on Galveston as we speak for their new charity drive. Good for them.

These pictures were taken yesterday and the day before (I think) and show that there are a LOT of people still hurting. This area has a LONG way to go.

Sabine Pass

Click here for My Photobucket Ike Album. I upload a lot of camera phone pics here. Some of these don't make it to the blog so you can see more photos.

Today was my first day as the new CR Manager for my county. My boss got promoted so I took over for him. I decided to go take a drive to the south part of the county and seeing what was going on down there.

Wow.

Just wow.

The storm aside, this is a unique place. I don't know what all of the large structures are, but I presume that this is where they build offshore oil rigs. I think what I was seeing was offshore rigs in various states of construction and repair. Everything here is on an immense scale.



I wasn't aware how much like LA and FL that this place is. I was looking overhead watching a flock of flamingos fly by. Pelicans and other water birds wheeled overhead. As I was driving along the intracoastal waterway, I saw this:


This guy's been dead a while, and someone propped his jaws open with a beer bottle. No way I just saw that!

This is some real destruction. I won't post all of the pics here...just go look at the album to see them. The Search and Rescue markings on the buidings were pretty chilling and reminiscent of Katrina.

These people are wiped out. Even the ones on stilts got flooded by the 20' storm surge. People said Ike wasn't as bad as they thought it was going to be. I dunno...this was pretty bad. I'll see more of this soon, and post pictures, but for now, I just need to process it and figure out what small thing our team can do (if anything) to help the situation.

More later.

I just wanted to catch up some photos from the past week:

Bad day for the Tile and Carpet store

I'll Huff and I'll Puff...down goes the brick wall.

Excuse me, would you please remove your store from the roof of my house?
This was bad because a man's elderly mom was living in the house which might have been compromised by the impact and weight of the building.

More damage

After the 3' thick tree trunk was removed from the house.

This wall of debris was 6' tall and went all the way down the street

A strong case for evacuation.

I don't know the scientific name for this species of tree. I just call them "Texas Housecrushers"

Dog and Pony

The last two days have been dedicated to giving informational 'town hall' meetings for the employees of Exxon Mobil. It was really great of the company to allow us to talk to their employees. It's a great way to reach a bunch of people quickly.

The facilities in this area provide a large portion of the petrochemical products our country depends on. These folks are some hard workin Texans. They all wear these work shirts that are kind of western-style with a US flag on one shoulder and a Texas flag on the other. During one of our meetings, this group of guys from the refinery walks in, hard hats in hand. I think the smallest one was 6'3" and 250 or so. They weren't smiling.

Great. At least there were no torches or pitchforks...

Most of these folks were just confused about the seemingly byzantine process of storm relief. They expressed their thoughts on the 'user friendlieness' of the registration process in no uncertain terms. They were also pissed at the fact that their responsible behavior like working hard, buying flood insurance and paying taxes was not rewarded with quick relief while those who did not act responsibly (no account SOBs) got quick relief.

I had not much to say about that...they were right, that's an unfortunate fact of government.

We managed to soothe some of the tempers and get back on track and I think most of them left with a plan for how to proceed from there...they weren't giddy with us, but at least they were on the right path toward getting some of their problems solved. Most of them thanked us and said they appreciated us.

I was impressed with their company from what I saw...they really seemed to be a tight community. Very family-like.

7-7-7

Sept 29th
Seven am to Seven pm, seven days a week.

Well I'm on day 8 of 12+ hrs a day. I'm not whining...but I am dragging today a bit. We're hearing some of the stories from Bridge City where the damage was pretty horrific. I haven't seen it personally, but we will get out there soon. I spoke with a woman who's house was completely flooded...mudded is more like it.

These folks are on the beginning of a long road to recovery. It will be months...maybe a year until they can rebuild. The beginning is dealing with insurers, registering with FEMA, bank issues, mortgage issues, finding a place to live until their houses are rebuilt/repaired. Many of them are housing relatives and friends (and neighbors they don't really know in some cases, bless their hearts). They're tired and frustrated and frazzled. Some will cry at the drop of a hat, but somehow they don't lash out at us. Sometimes they do a little, but they always rein it in and apologize. That amazes me. Most of these folks are beyond nice to us. I don't know if I'd be that nice to me if I were in their situation.

Today Thomas and I visited a dozen or so churches...they are doing great work for their communities as they always do. They help us get the word out about registering and make our job easier. One place was ramping down their shelter...the Southern Baptist Convention folks were out with the Chainsaws in that area...they are some neat people...'the chainsaw ministry' I've heard it called. They are trained at debris clearing and they do a GREAT job.

Tomorrow we're doing a town-hall meeting for Exxon Mobil in Beaumont. Their employees are coming to hear us talk about FEMA benefits, etc. Hopefully they'll be as nice to us as everyone else has...I'm sure they will.

Bad day in Beaumont

Well...it's like this: I had a bad day Sunday.

We were working a trailer park, a big one, in Beaumont. This wasn't a "Manufactured Home Community," this was a trailer park. The trailers there were crappy before the storm. These were held together with bailing wire and bad luck.

I felt that the only way the people in this park were going to be reached by our programs was to knock on the doors and tell them how to get help. So we went. Thomas and I did about half the park and did great. We even did well with the 50 percent of people who didn't 'habla Ingles' (I have GOT to get some language skills). Then another team joined us after lunch and we started in on the other half.

Things were going fine until we knocked on the crazy guy's trailer.

"I have a shotgun...step away from the trailer" he says. I started jogging and waved my teammates back to the car.

BOOM!

The cops claim that it was just him kicking his door open...I say bullshit. I know a 20 gauge when I hear it. So did the neighbors who were running with us.

After further analysis, I am most upset about the fact that this one crackpot caused a bunch of people who need help to not get it because our bosses are freaked out and won't let us back in the area.

Don't tell my wife...she'd freak. ;-)

Hurricane Ike...Back in the Saddle Again!

Hello,

I'm back in the saddle again for the response to Hurricane Ike. I've been here a week and this one has been pretty busy so that's why I haven't posted yet.

I'm working in Beaumont, TX and doing Community Relations work again. The area my team is assigned to, Jefferson County, was hit very hard by the storm. In the area of the City of Beaumont that I'm working, the damage is mostly from wind. East Texas has pines...the 'piney woods'...in the neighborhoods, there are these magnificent pine trees, 80 foot tall and two feet thick. They tend to snap off at the top and skewer houses. There are also big Oak trees that are shallow-rooted and these tend to uproot and just crush what they fall on.

The scale of this disaster is MUCH more widespread than the Wisconsin floods from this summer. Most of the homes here have at least some damage. There is much more devastation here as well...debris, etc. I'll try to post some pictures soon to give you a feel for what things look like here.

It is nice to be back among Texans again...

More later...I'm off to work this beautiful Sunday morning.

What I did on my summer vacation

So this disaster wasn't the earth shattering ordeal that Katrina and Rita were. Each person down here who lost their home went through pure hell. Many here are still going through that. Don't for one minute think that I would ever diminish that. I haven't lived through it, but I've walked through the aftermath and stood there while the people told me what they lost.

This was different. We were on the end of this disaster where there were a few people whose homes were destroyed, but most had flooded basements. For most people I worked with, this disaster was a nuisance, not a nightmare. It's hard to feel much gratification for helping people when you really didn't.

But hey...I learned a lot about local/state/federal politics and the dynamics of a declared disaster. I can see this scenario in my neighborhood where the jurisdiction next door is more urban and is more affected. My jurisdiction next door might be analagous to Washington county. They're declared because all their neighbors are, so they declare the whole lower half of the state.

I will say that I'm proud to work for this organization. FEMA may be f-ed up in many ways, but they bring thousands of people, material, and piles of money into an area and stand up a fortune-500 sized organization in a matter of days and get good work done. These people that I work with are amazing. They're so dedicated to helping and making a positive difference...in spite of what many people think of the organization...and just keep plugging 12 hours a day for months on end. God bless them. Our nation owes them a debt of gratitude. I'm very proud to be part of it.

I'm going home on Tuesday. I miss my wife and kids terribly. I can't wait to get home. I have nothing wanting to keep me here in wisconsin like I did in Texas. I did what I came here to do...I think I did it honorably and I hope I advanced the art in some small way. I'm ready to go.

Tomorrow I will be closing the work out in Washington county. I will turn my maps and notes and reports and contacts over to the team lead and shove off to some other county to help out for a couple of days until I leave.

I'll be visiting Jen, my partner from Hurricane Rita, on Saturday and her husband and friends. We'll camp and drink some beer and party and generally have a great time. I can't wait. I have made another good friend this trip. Ron, my partner this time is a fantastic guy. Sixty-something, retired, hard working dude. You my boy, Ron!!

I'll try to make a couple more entries before I get, but we're pretty close to done.

Thanks, Wisconsin...I enjoyed your state. You're all very familiar, good people.

Michigan still makes better beer, though.

Settling into a groove

When it's good, its a groove, when it's bad, it's a rut.

We're groovin here in Washington County. For the past couple of days, we've been trying to root out where the damage is. This disaster isn't like hurricane Rita where you just look for the blue tarps on the roof.

First of all, you have to define the term 'storm damage' with people. In that stoic midwestern style and folksy Wisconsin accent, people just tell you 'Oh it was no big deeeeel. We just trew da rugs out and got on with it'. It's actually hard to find where the damage is here because most of it was a result of the water table making acquaintances with the surface. Basements being in between this rendezvous resulted in a lot of wet basements.

When water mixes with drywall and any other porous material, it forms yuckiness in the basement. 3 weeks after the storm, it forms toxic mold. My biggest worry is people (most often older folks) who just don't want to 'be a bother' to anyone. It sounds kind of silly, but I'm trying to get these people to register with FEMA when they 'only had a few inches' of water. That few inches, depending on the basement, can cause a household to get sick.

The routine has been to visit a town or village hall, root out some clues to where the damage is and then pound on doors the rest of the day preaching the gospel of 1-800-621-FEMA. Hey...its a job. If you keep looking at my Google map, you'll see where we've been.

Off to write reports now...

A little time off

We got to take the afternoon off this Sunday. My partner and I went to catch a Brewer's game. It was a beautiful day and I got the opportunity to add one more Major League ballpark to my collection. I've gotten to visit 3 ballparks on FEMA deployments so far.

Miller Park is really a nice ballpark. We got there a little later than we should so there was only standing room seats. Here's the view from Standing Room seats


Right on the 3B line...very nice. In the shade, the vendors walk right by, you're right in front of all the concessions. There are little tables to set your stuff on as well. I even got a bobblehead!
What a nice afternoon. Here's some more pics of the park.




The home team beat the Pittsburgh Pirates...happy day! Tomorrow, back to the grind. I have to be 40 minutes away at 7am tomorrow. So we hit the road at 6am.

Where in the world?

Hello,

I created a Google Map to show where I've been:

Click Here

The blue lines are places I've covered. The place marks are self explanatory.

Catch up

Dayum. I can't seem to keep up with one entry a day.

Here's a highlight reel...We screwed around for half a week and didn't have much of a plan. Then I got assigned to Washington County. The county seat is West Bend which is where I'm staying. This is a nice little town.

For the first day or so, we met the local officials and got the lay of the land. Turns out the damage was near the rivers and lakes in the county (go figure). I was given the lead for the county and assigned one community relations officer to help me. Ron is a great guy...a retired gentleman also from Michigan. He and I have been all over the county and we work well together.

He's not trying to impress anyone. He just wants to go door-to-door and meet people. We call it 'paper hanging' because we pass out flyers as part of our door-to-door routine. So after we got our base of operations all set up here at the Country Inn, we made a plan for how to attack this large county with only two people.

I really enjoy the fact that we are the only ones out here and we're left pretty much to our own devices. I think the leadership is pretty happy with our results, so the leave us alone...so far. We've visited some lakes in the area and have seen some pretty bad flooding in spots. Mostly, though, it's just basement flooding and other minor stuff.

Yesterday, we hit the lakes and saw the worst of the flooding so far. Some people there are truly devastated. This might be a minor disaster to the county as a whole, but these people are truly screwed up and hurting. If there's anything I can do for these people, they're going to be my priority.

Toward the end of yesterday, we stopped into the city of Hartford and met the Mayor and City Administrator. We hit the fire hall and talked to the fire inspector also and got a feel for what was going on there. Today, we hit the streets hard.

Again, not much damage..just a few damp basements. But then came the crown jewel of the entire trip so far: Ms Nellie.

Ms. Nellie is 93 years young. She's spry and lives by herself. Her husband passed 30 years ago and she has no family left. She has a nephew who helps out once in a while, but otherwise she has nobody to talk to. I arrived at her door to ask how she got through the flood. She said she was fine, but had some damage downstairs. She couldn't do much about it because she can't get down the stairs.

She couldn't give a damn about the water in her basement. There was someone on her porch to talk to. So we talked.

And talked...about 20 minutes into the visit, I realized why God was letting me exist on the planet at that moment. My job was to stand there just as long as Ms. Nellie wanted to talk and keep this woman company for a little while.

She told me about her husband...owned a hardware store. Times were hard during the depression. She's always scrimped and saved. She told me about her life and her church and everything else. Her views on the world today, politics, philosophy and everything else.

She finally ran out of gas and I stood there and shook her withered, arthritic hand and wished her well and walked off her porch...I'm a much richer man for having met Ms. Nellie. She absolutely made my trip.

Just when I thought this wasn't going to be a very rewarding trip.

Nursing Home with 82 residents who had to relocate. The containers are their belongings being trucked away...sad














Saturday:
Today we went to Jefferson County to revisit the community of Fort Atkinson. We kept canvassing in the areas that we noticed had definite flood damage. It's been 3 weeks since the first part of the flooding and people are starting to get on with things where the damage was, but the river is still bank-full at least. Another line of storms dumping rain is going to soak these people again. I hope that doesn't happen.


















Tonight I went over to Erin's Snug Irish Pub. Nice joint except I was damn near the only one in there. I had dinner there and a couple of sodas and played some darts with some of the staff that was bored by the lack of business. Nice group of people.

Travelin time

We went to the East side of the state today. We visited some small towns like Mequon, WI today. This was the highest water evidence we've seen. Probably 4 feet in the road and more near the homes. I'll try to get some pictures scanned and uploaded later.

I lost my car keys today and had a hell of an evening...grr.

More details when I'm not so brain dead.

2nd day on the job

My second day, we visited Jefferson county. We started by visiting the emergency manager who was a lady who really had her stuff together. I would like to learn some more from her...very impressive handle on chaos.

Jefferson was screwed up. A big hassle for the residents was the bridges were out and you had many miles to drive (all the way down to Ft. Atkinson) to get over the river. Very severe flooding and the water hasn't gone down much. One bridge is open to only emergency vehicles. It's guarded by the National Guard and to cross, you have to show ID, drive 5mph down the middle one car at a time and think light thoughts.

We then went south to see Ft. Atkinson. Got blocked in some places by flooded road. Crazy. Hard to get places.

I got to meet up with some friends tonight and ate the best steak of my life. I had the meat sweats from the pound of ribeye. Yum.

First day on the job...

The alarm rang at 6am. I was fed, dressed, and at the office at 7am sharp. I called the lady at the office who was my point of contact. She instructed me to call in on the morning conference call and listen in...ostensibly to learn what was going on.

Turns out that half the country...the middle half...is underwater. FEMA is stretched. There's a lot to do and not many people to do it. The resource curve is catching up, though. Despite what the media likes to report, this is an amazing organization full of amazing, motivated people.

After the usual paperwork, I got a cell phone, an ID badge, and an assignment. The Public Information Officer function is short-staffed so they asked me if I was interested in helping out with that function since I have a small amount of experience. I got 'interviewed' for that position and they must have thought I had a face for radio...fine with me. I got assigned to a Community Relations (CR) team.

Community Relations is the process where FEMA gets into an area and establishes a presence. The goal is to get the citizens affected by the disaster to call the 1-800-621-FEMA number and register for assistance. Getting that word to everyone in the area is a challenge and it involves going to churches, businesses, bars, old-folks homes, etc and mostly door-to-freakin-door to talk to people. We also are out there to be identify the needs of the community.

So that's what we did today. We were in the smallish town of Watertown, WI where the Rock River ran amuck. The damage wasn't catastrophic here, but there were a LOT of flooded basements. It was a good warm-up. There will be a lot more tomorrow.

Nothing really remarkable. My co-workers are a nice bunch from the 4 corners of the country. One from Jersey, another from Mississippi, another from New Hampshire, and finally one from North Carolina. We didn't spend too much time getting to know each other. I look forward to getting to know these folks as the time goes by.

I really am hoping for a group of people to hang out with after hours. I know that will materialize soon enough. For now, I have my laptop and cell phone to stay busy with. Tonight after work, I tried to get some indigenous treats. Culver's is a local fast food legend that makes some amazing hamburgers!! I also picked up a six-pack of 'Spotted Cow' Ale. Very nice!

Not a bad day...I'm back in the saddle. I look forward to meeting up with some online friends that live here in Madison...that will be fun. One more Spotted Cow and off to beddy-bye

Here's the tired boy. Had to try out the mobile blogging feature..it works. Yay me.

So I'm here...now what?

Welcome to the blog. I'm going to try to record my experience with the 2008 storm season helping out with FEMA and whatever elso comes my way.

Today I arrived in Madison, WI. I don't have a lot of intel on exactly what the damage is with regard to the flooding. I just checked into my hotel and will go to the Joint Field Office (JFO) tomorrow to see what's up.

Since I was only one state over, I rented a car and drove instead of braving the air travel system. If I end up staying here, it may be a good decision...I was able to bring a cooler, my boom box, and some other comforts of home.

Chicago sucks to drive through. I'm bushed...Good night.