Today was not the easiest day of this crisis. Tensions are starting to run high, and living in all the disarray is frying everyone's nerves. We are starting to pick fights and get tired of everyone else's shit, to be perfectly frank. We focused mostly on emptying the units, so the most amazing restoration crew in town can get inside and start cutting out the drywall in the more flooded unit. That means packing up box after box of manga books (Japanese graphic novel series, for those who don't know), and trying to play three-dimensional Tetris in the one single car garage we have available for both units. The boxes my younger daughter bought for the books are the medium moving variety, far too large for book boxes, unless one has the lifting prowess of Lou Ferrigno in his prime. The cleaning crew focused on the back corner unit of our building, where I understand flood water was over a foot deep. I think it might explain why the damage was worst in our two spare bedrooms, one on either side of their unit, where we had common walls. Their front door faced the flooded culvert, where ours faced away. The sad part is, when the floods first started, the girls all went back there to help clear the patio drain, like they had to do on their own, and they thought they had totally saved the day, until the big surge came.
I walked with my older daughter and her dog, and got a clearer look at the lower units, where she had run off to answer screams for help after clearing the drains up here. The waterline on some of the exterior walls I could see was between three and four feet up, and there was another building even farther down the hill where it was worse. It was in that worse building where she had been among a crew trying to save a woman trapped in her apartment. The water was almost four feet deep outside, and when they managed to pry open the door, water came out from a foot or more higher, in a big wall. This woman handed out her dog first, and refused to come out without her other dog. The people had to physically remove the woman, and my girl restrained her from going back in after the dog and risking more lives. All of them then ran up to an upper unit balcony, where they were later rescued by a ladder truck that was parked on the main street, with the ladder horizontal across the berm. (I watched this rescue on the Internet, and my brother saw it on national news, neither of us knowing that my daughter was in that group.) One of the women I saw on the rescue truck was favoring her right hand, and I learned later she had it slammed into the door when the water pushed it against her. It was that moment that the group refused to let the woman stall further wanting her dog to be rescued. When we found out on Tuesday that the dog did not die, my older daughter was so relieved. He had been found the next day, in the bedroom, floating on a mattress, confused but unharmed.
Tonight we are dealing with another hand injury. My future son in law went to work tonight, and ended up having two of his fingers smashed. So instead of coming right back with the cleaning supplies I'd requested, my younger daughter took him to the ER to get an X-ray. He has a hairline fracture in his middle finger that should heal well enough, provided he doesn't lift heavy boxes or put a lot of torque on the injured digit. So that will make the next few days interesting. I'm glad my brother is sticking around a few days after I leave, to make sure the packing out is concluded appropriately.
I read something I missed at the meeting last night: if the base cabinets in the kitchens or bathrooms come out, that makes the unit legally uninhabitable. That would push us back into the six months of evacuation category, which would cause a lot of logistical nightmares.
I think this will be the last set of damage pictures, starting with the scene of the crime, as it were, the grate over the culvert where all the debris collected, causing our local flood.
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