Yesterday, I received three separate confirmations plus photos of the little house on Church Street. It was not good news. The water line on the exterior of the house is visible and is about a foot above the base of my window sills in the house, and virtually all of the garage. Estimates are between 3 and 3.5 feet in the house and 6 feet in the garage.
Imagine if you will getting word that virtually everything in your house is now guaranteed to be sitting in a sludge of silt, mud, sewer backup and who knows what else. Friends who went in their house two blocks away said it smelled like someone had used the house as a toilet for a week. I imagine it will be worse by the time I make it home to open the house. Granted we haven't even seen the inside of my house. But based on reports of others in similar situations, I have no reason to doubt that I will open my door to an overwhelming stench and the muddy sludge on everything.
Based on where the water line is in relation to my windows, I lost everything I put on top of my dining room table in one failed attempt to save something from rising waters. All of my photo albums are now gone. The pictures of my house before renovation. The pictures from those fun days at Mizzou. Pictures of my friends' kids. My photos from that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Cuba. Everything. Every photo I ever took before the days of digital - gone. Floating in a pool of sludge.
My new sewing machine I loved so much. Rocky's kennel (I haven't broken the news to him, he has a strange attachment to his stuff and the reaction isn't likely to be good). My clothes. My shoes. Every piece of furniture will need to be refinished. The piano I learned to play on will be ruined beyond repair. Every CD I ever purchased. The afghan a friend's mom made me when I graduated high school. The blanket - my favorite blanket - I bought when my folks and I went skiing in Colorado. The afghan my Gram made for my other grandmother. Gone.
Everything. Gone. My new bathroom, ruined. All my pots and pans beneath the cabinets. My film cameras. My knitting basket. All of my scrapbook supplies. All of my personal paperwork and records. My copies of special sections I worked on at the newspaper. Every record of my house I have - all stored in boxed beneath my desk. All of my CD backups. Discs of photos that I'm not sure if I put on my external hard drives, which are with me here. My cedar chest full of every baby item mom gave me to keep - my first blanket, my lock of hair, my first tooth lost. They're all in there. In the garage, my Christmas ornaments that I remember hanging as a child with mom, dad and Nanny. Ornaments mom and I made together. Ornaments mom and dad made together. Ornaments I made in school. All of these records of my life, washed away.
On an intellectual and reasonable level, I know it is just stuff and it can all be replaced. But on an emotional level, it’s an incomprehensible feeling to accept that everything that makes your house a home is gone. Destroyed. Covered in a sludge that I’m going to have to walk through. Someone told me I can get a hazmat suit or something like it at the Bass Pro shop down the road. Might have to investigate that.
I don’t even know how I’ll begin to clean it up. Do you just bring in a hose and wash it all outside? Do you shovel? Do you just cut the house off at that level and let it fall? I’m a bit overwhelmed, but am determined to create a plan — the only thing I can do right now — so I can get started as soon as we are allowed back and have water.
I did talk with the representatives from the National Flood Insurance Program and filed my official claim. When I told her the water level, her response was a very somber “Oh.” Not an encouraging feeling when the woman with the national flood program gives a sympathetic “oh” as in “oh, you poor thing, your house is totaled.” My gut tells me, my gut hopes, the adjuster will just write the claim for my full policy.
We did not make it to the island yesterday for the look and leave. We’re just too far to risk not being able to get back because of gas shortages in the greater Houston area. But we talked to a friend who finally got to leave the island yesterday and he said we don’t want to be there anyway. He described a scene that I cannot even begin to appreciate. The search parties started going door to door looking for bodies. With the help of cadaever finding dogs, they are systematically searching the island because some of the neighborhoods are getting that smell. Add to that the smell of sewage and dead fish and my friend says it’s horrible and getting worse every day. The conditions are horrendous still.
It makes me admire those folks in 1900 even more. Think about it — waking up one morning to find a pile of debris as tall as a house lining the island, walking over the rubble and seeing arms and legs extending from beneath it, and the smell. The horrible smell of death. And then deciding to rebuild. I cannot even imagine when I’m wondering how to being the recovery just at my house. Here were people who rebuilt not just their homes but then the entire island. I admire and respect that and hope I can muster even a drop of that courage and determination.
Note: See photos friends sent me here
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