Thursday, August 15, 2019

2016 Flood 3 years ago today

It has been three years today.  The FEMA notation on our files listed it as FEMA Event 8-14-16.
Later in the post I give the link to the beginning of the 2016 Flood emails, but if you don't realy anything, read this one.
they are taking my stuff


I really need to convince myself that three years have passed, it feels like yesterday.....simple things can bring me back to that night in a mere heartbeat.



The weekend we had planned in Orange Beach AL was nothing but driving rain.  So we decided on 8-13-16 to drive home early.  Thank goodness we did that or we would not have made it home at all.







I can honestly say that we never once considered the possibility that our house would flood.  We had been there for 35 years and never had seen standing water in the street once.  These two photos are water in our yard and behind our property in places I have never seen it before or since.



We were in shock.  Total and complete shock.  When the water got to my knees, I knew we had to leave the house.  With the 3 bassets, I had to be responsible for their lives.  They had no idea what was happening.  None had ever seen water anywhere but their bowls.  And yet, they jumped into 2 feet deep water and let us float them across 4 foot chest high water in the streets.


Here is my front door as we decided to leave the house 


Here is my car.  Frank's was on the other side of mine and already underwater as well.


Here is my bathroom.  If you need a reference for how high the water was just before we left.  It continued to rise after we were being moved down Jones Creek by the Cajun Navy boats.





















It was sometime about here that I made the decision to write a blog post every day while we were living in the Camper From Hell, dealing with FEMA and contractors, plumbers who wouldn't show up, fighting for materials when 160,000 other houses needed the same things we did.  


If you want to go back to any of those posts, because they are an amazing chronicle of what it is to feel the loss of everything and then have to fight the adjuster and the plumber just to do their jobs right.  My neighbor and I say that one day we will write a book, one that we needed, about what to do when a flood strikes.  Neither of us had any clue.  We jut fought through every day.

It changed me.  It changed what I was.  It changed what I am.  I doubt I will ever feel "right" again.  















     

4 comments:

  1. I remember reading your blog posts and just feeling so bad for you (and others)...I can't imagine how you felt or still feel about this life disaster. I still feel so bad for you and worry when you post about pending rain.

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  2. You are stronger than you thought you could be, more vulnerable than you want to be and by a lot of effort you have begun again. I read those blogs every day that I could, I wrote to you like so many others because we cared that you would pick up the pieces. You can laugh now about the ugly FEMA trailer next door and some of the hoops you had to jump through, and most of all you are out of the camper forever. You are living again no more surviving and I love seeing it.

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  3. I hated to read this post. I don't think I followed you back then. The picture of the water behind your front door is heart wrenching. Living in a FEMA trailer. My daughter worked on those trailers. There were so made codes the company told them to ignore that she quit and went to another company. She has installed converters in all classes of RV for more than 20 years and takes pride in her integrity. I pray you will never experience a flood again.
    xx, Carol

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