2015 Flood {chapter 2: Assessing the Damage}

(Start from the beginning.)

 

So many of the details from the first few days following the flood are such a blur.

I remember the night of the 4th, when Emory broke down, trying to process all that had happened. She began recalling very specific things in her room, asking if they'd be fine. I wasn't able to give her an adequate answer, let alone the one she wanted to hear, and my heart broke. The feeling of uncertainty was scary, and while Aaron and I were bracing ourselves for assessing the loss, it felt unfair that my eight year old had to deal with the same feelings. We sat, talking and crying, and I tried to assure her that everything would be okay, all the while questioning the very same thing.

That night, the sound of heavy rain (yet again) woke me up after what felt like just minutes of sleep.  A replay of the day began running through my mind, and, as it often is, the replay was even scarier and upsetting than the actual event. Aaron reached over the girls, who were sleeping between us, and held my hand as I sobbed until the sun came up.

We got a call from our neighbor early the next morning that the water had receded enough for us to get into the house.

We headed over with my parents and brother-in-law to see the damage. Water had definitely receded a few feet, and was now just below the front porch, but the water still surrounded the house, and the street was still a river. We parked up the road and walked down, wading through the water to get to the front door. I was ready to get in and see it all... to see what contents we lost (we assumed everything) and see how bad the house itself was (we assumed not too bad).

 

 

As we left the house early Sunday morning, we couldn't see either of our cars, and assumed they had been carried away and were now in the lake. Getting back to the house, we saw my suburban had floated out of our driveway, into the neighbors' yard across the street and was lodged up against a tree. Aaron's car had been carried to the end of our driveway, where it still sat in the moving waters.

Walking up to the front door, as I spotted so many of the kids' small, now muddy and water-logged, toys scattered on the front porch and down the steps, my stomach dropped, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to handle going in. So much furniture had landed just inside the front door, that we weren't able to open it, forcing Aaron and Alex to go through the garage, which was still full of about two feet of water, to get into the house.

 

 

 

 

Walking into the house was quite shocking. Half of our belongs were in completely different rooms than where we had left them, while other things (like our dining table) seemed to have floated up as the water rose, then settled right back down in their correct place as the water came down.

 The floor, and everything on it, was covered in a surprisingly thick layer of mud. The stairs leading up to our bedroom were coated in the mud and already so warped and soggy that getting up safely was difficult.

 We were saddened to see that the stuff we thought was most definitely safe on the floor of our raised bedroom had been submerged in 9 inches of water. Many of our scrapbooks, pictures, yearbooks and other important things were completely ruined.

  Water still filled so many little nooks and crannies in the kitchen, and cabinets and drawers were water-logged to the point that we couldn't open them.

 

 

 

It was interesting to walk through and see that so much was absolutely beyond repair, yet there were certain things that were in plastic bins and just floated around, completely unharmed.

 

 I initially began trying to pick up each and every tiny toy or trinket that I wanted to save, but almost instantly realized that would have been a never-ending task.

 We very quickly organized a system of getting out what we wanted to try and salvage first. Luckily, all of my china, crystal and silver was stored in the top of a closet and was unharmed. Most pieces were from our wedding, but I had many pieces from my grandmother and godmother, and felt such a relief that they were safe.

 Aaron's mom and Bob arrived and began the nasty task of taking out all of the clothing. While it was all soaking wet, and much of it was muddy, we thought that if we could get it cleaned fast enough, we had a good chance of saving most of it. Our entire side of town was without water, so Aaron's mom coordinated a 'laundry train' of sorts, and by the time she got back on her side of town (which still had water) that night, there were tons of friends and neighbors in her driveway, ready to grab bags of wet clothes to take and wash for us.

Unfortunately, our garage door had been completely ripped off, and the only things left in our garage were the golf cart, an empty wire shelf and the cozy coupe. I would later spot our garage refrigerator wedged against a gate a handful of streets over, and recognized it only by the pink ribbon still on the handle where we kept a pair of scissors tied so the kids could cut open their own popsicles.

 

  We gathered a few other things, such as jewelry and framed pictures and artwork from the walls, and left with car loads of belongings we were hoping to salvage.  While those things filled our cars to the brim, it wasn't a drop in the bucket of what we were leaving behind, and what we thought we were losing.

 Tuesday morning came, and as we arrived back at the house to begin the cleanup, we were SHOCKED at the amount of people already there and working. In addition to the shock of the sheer number of people, we were baffled at the fact that so many were strangers, or at least not our close friends. The guys from Aaron's gym, the family from our church, the kids that I grew up babysitting years ago. Most people were friends of friends of friends, and were at our home, willing to spend their day not only dragging out muddy belongings, but coordinating cleanup efforts to salvage as much as possible.

 Kitchen cabinet contents were sorted and sent off to be washed. Soaking wet mattresses and upholstered furniture were taken out and tossed in a trash pile. Friends found my ruined recipe books and snapped pictures of each handwritten recipe before they tossed it.  Most importantly, every time I was too tired and overwhelmed to decide what could or should be kept, someone was there to step in and make the decision for me.

 When most of the contents of the house had been brought out to the front yard and were being sorted into piles of keep, toss, store, etc, there was another four or five dozen people back in the house beginning demo.

 Within the next 48 hours, every wall, cabinet and floor would be gone. At that point we had no idea what the plans were for the house, but it had been taken down to just the studs in the hope of drying it out.  

 Over the next week or so, we were visited by a handful of 'official' people of all sorts. The insurance adjuster. The flood consultant. The structural engineer. The builder. The FEMA agent. All had more information than we could handle, and much of it was conflicting information. We had been able to salvage much more of our 'stuff' than we originally thought we'd be able to, but, sadly, our house was in bad shape. The decisions we needed to make were big.