You Just Never Know.
Like the rest of the country, I’ve been watching the news in horror as fires consume parts of California wine country and thousands of people’s homes. And all this after the summer wildfires hit Oregon/Washington/Montana, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, Hurricane Irma hit Florida, and the Las Vegas shooter hit concertgoers.
Several times I’ve started to respond to my California friends’ Facebook evacuation posts with a statement like, “I have a spare room in Florida if anyone wants to evacuate from California.”
But then I remember — I don’t have a home either.
Exactly one month ago, on 9/11, I got the phone call from my landlady. My home had been lost to Hurricane Irma’s flooding during the night. (I had evacuated to stay with my Dad and his wife in West Virginia. I left my home with three flats of bottled water, some clothing, and my passport, my kids’ birth certificates, and other important papers.) It was hard for my landlady and her manfriend to get into the neighborhood because of all the downed trees and power lines, but they came in to survey the damage, and found a foot of water in the house.
Trouble is, it wasn’t hurricane rain water or blown water — it was sewage.
A month ago, I’d never heard of a lift station, but since then, I’ve learned that the County operates 170 of them in our tiny city (Ocala, FL), and the City operates another 131. Lift stations lift sewage from local neighborhoods and pump it to the main sewage stations. Turns out that City Lift Station #129 up the street, like most of the mini-stations citywide, was without power for several hours during the storm. #129 overflowed, as the City expected it would, and flooded my home and at least three of my neighbors’ homes. A “sewer force main break” occurred nearby as well and probably contributed to the flood.
I collected a sample of the sludge-water in my home and had it tested. The fecal count was 2,000 parts per 100ml. (To put it into perspective, 100ml is a fraction, about 1/5th, of a 16.9-ounce soft drink.) One of my neighbor’s samples tested at a whopping 37,000, but their house has a slightly lower elevation than mine — I guess shit stinks AND sinks.
After the 12-hour drive home, then came the renting of storage space — and the instant move-out of my salvageable stuff while I was still in shock — and moving into a friend’s spare room, and filling his living room with my artwork and boxes of my must-access things.
Although I lost $80,000 worth of belongings, from valuable homeopathic medicines to big, heavy, expensive reference books to Oriental rugs to furniture to musical instruments, I was able to save many things, and that is one of the differences between…
