What I learned from Hurricane Harvey

I've been wanting to write about this experience for a while, but just haven't had the words appropriately assembled in my head. I live North of Austin so for me Hurricane Harvey was a non-event, but a little over an hours drive away there was utter devastation unfolding.

Hurricane Harvey wasn't like most Hurricanes. It's danger wasn't derived by high wind speeds (although there was plenty of that) it was rather derived from its path. (or the lack thereof) So what normally would have been flooding along a 400 mile path of a passing Hurricane, became flooding in one single place for what seemed like an eternity. WeatherBell, a weather analytics company, estimated Harvey dumped 27 trillion gallons of rain over Texas and Louisiana during a 6-day period. Rain gauges were measuring 51.88 inches of rain. CRAZY!

But in Austin... misty rain and clear skies. My good fortunes were a cheap justification to sit around and do nothing. I wanted to help but I didn't have a boat, and that's what was immediately needed. I was very impressed by the people around me who did have boats volunteering their time and resources to help others.

First Lesson: Associate yourself with charitable people

I'm Mormon, so I grew up doing service projects since I was a kid. My father was in charge of a similar cleanup effort when the Teton Dam burst in 1976. So personally serving people in need was taken seriously in our house. But I'm not alone, there are literally millions of service oriented people out there. Exercising your right to associate with those people is what makes meaningful service possible. In my case there were multiple parties that made that service possible.

Mormon Helping Hands

In Houston, once the water started clearing out, over 270,000 homes were damaged, mostly by standing water. Water is so unforgiving, once it settles in there's little recourse but to throw EVERYTHING out that the water touched, cut out the sheet rock, and tear out the insulation. (often called mucking-out a house) The longer the wet goes unattended to, the worse the health hazard and structural integrity of the home becomes.

The Mormon Helping Hands organization has an excellent emergency program to mobilize LDS members during a disaster. Hurricane Harvey was no exception. Over 11,000 Mormons made their way to the disaster stricken homes in the Houston area. This mass of people were broken down into project teams and assigned work orders to "muck-out" houses. I was assigned to such a team. With my daughter, we packed up water, a change of clothes, boots and all sorts of hazmat gear and tools, then we drove down at 4AM Saturday morning. Our return home wouldn't be till Sunday late afternoon. We went from house to house moving out mattresses, refrigerators, flooring, and even entire kitchens. The homes were literally toxic. The owners of the homes were sometimes overflowing with gratitude, others were in the depths of despair, and some were just numb. Neighbors and other church groups were distributing water and sandwiches. We were all there to help in any way we could. The flooded refrigerators emanated a stench which was intolerable, and filled entire neighborhoods with the smell of rotting flesh. The neighborhood yards and sidewalks were piled with everything that was in the houses.

The work was very tiring, and some houses had been abandoned ever since the flood occured. Walking into a house that has been soaking wet for 3 weeks is daunting. Homes like that took two days with multiple 10 man crews. This continued on for 3 weekends in a row. The email would go out with work orders of families in need. Each weekend I would pack up my stuff and make my way down to Houston. Sleeping accommodations were provided at a local High School gym, but I opted for a hotel if I could find one.

About 2 weeks into it I came across this video, and what the newscaster said in his closing remarks brought me to tears. Crying isn't usually in the cards for me, but I was touched by the privilege to be associated to the people I was serving with, and their willingness to stick it out weekend after weekend. These are people that I can trust.

INTRICITY

There are many organizations that are very charitable out there. But there is definitely something very different about Intricity. Intricity is personally charitable. This is my own term, but in my mind it means that someone is willing to give directly to someone else's benefit. VS the typical 3rd party charity that you give your money to and forget about it. Intricity went out of their way to work with my crazy schedule during the Hurricane Harvey disaster, even pressing me to take a break from work.

I won't mention one of our team members by name, just because He would really not like the attention. But He personally gives donations to individuals every month when He hears about their dire situation in the news. He also personally sponsors inner city minority students through college and has became their mentor. This is the kind of stuff you find at Intricity. Most of it goes unsaid, but it doesn't go undone.

So in many ways, my trips to Houston were just an extension of that culture. I didn't think twice about if I was going down to help the people in Houston... worrying about whether my employer was going to understand or be supportive. I was going and they would be cheering me on.

This is what I mean by "Associate yourself with charitable people." Find people that care about personal charity, and hang on to them. These are the types of people that provide meaning to your life, and will inspire you to do the same.

Second Lesson: Time matters in so many ways

My second weekend in Houston was sobering. We walked into a house which had been abandoned by an elderly couple, and they had not returned to the house, opting instead to stay in the nursing home, which they were so fortunate to find. The house had an entire lifetime of pictures, trinkets, and family memories, most of which had been under 4-5 feet of water. The house hadn't been touched for over 3 weeks, so the mold had grown unabated. The house overlooked a small lake covered in trees. The water line could be seen in the dead leaves of the trees.

The difficulty I had breathing in a mask from the prior week prompted me to get a better one. I was SO glad I had it, because the smell in the house was indescribable. However, because I was the only one with a painter mask on, I took on the walk in closet which basically hadn't received any sunlight since the elderly couple had left. I've never seen mold grow 3 inches high before that day. It took me about 4 hours to get all their clothing out and tear down the walls, cabinets, and insulation. The water soaked items felt more like slime than just being wet.

After an entire day of work, sifting through the belongings of a elderly couple that I'll likely never meet, all that was left was a carefully preserved stack of things the crew thought they would like to keep. The stack sat like an island in the middle of the now striped bare house. There were pictures journals, trinkets, and many things we guessed would have been family memories. The culmination of their life story sat on this lonely island. The timing of everything was something I often reflect on even today.

• The time it took the elderly couple to raise their kids
• The time that the house sat decaying before we got there
• The donated time of the volunteers that were with me
• The limited time we have to get life figured out

Wasting time after this lesson seems to sting more than it did before. I'm not emerged a perfect person but I've realized I have things to work on, so I made a list...

1. Being present with my kids so that the time spent can't be constrained by a few pictures, but is preserved in their memories
2. When something is going wrong letting it sit unattended just makes it worse, like the water soaked house growing more toxic day by day
3. Find time to care more about people than things, the things will all at some point be consumed by nature

Third Lesson: Be Useful

When you drive your car into a flooded neighborhood there is nothing around you but raw need. The people everywhere are suffering intensely, their homes are literally rotten and they have piles of their damaged belongings on their front lawn stacked 8 feet high. I supposed you could call it hell. Taking this "hell" into perspective you quickly realize, if you're not going to help then its best that you don't come. If you spend every ounce of energy you have helping, you won't feel guilty taking a break every once in a while. And you'll definitely need a break after working with a dust mask for hours. I was quickly able to see who was useful, who could be counted on when it mattered. They weren't overcome by the task they just took it on, and with fury.

Working with some of our crew leaders, I realized how important their competence was in getting work done. There are gnarly situations like a wall sized mirror which has to be taken down without hurting people, or ripping out an entire kitchen, or even getting a tub out of a small bathroom, or raised floors that have to be ripped out. Having somebody there that can put some brains with the brawn can turn an endless job into a quick task.

Part of being useful, was to not get discouraged by the enormity of the task. When you walk into a kitchen and realize all the cabinets need to come out, the work can seem undoable. (After all, we're not use to seeing entire kitchens being taken apart) I've realized that the most important step is the first one, the latter ones are a piece of cake. Sometimes a sledgehammer with some determination can go a long way in getting that first step done. :)

Forth: The exterior facade is no indication of whats inside

If you pull up to a house that hasn't been touched since the flood, the first impression you usually get is "this doesn't look too bad". The exterior of the house looks fine... you might see the water line, but it doesn't look "really bad". Then when you go inside you start to get a sense of the magnitude of work ahead. But even then, you're not understanding the full breadth of the task ahead. Almost every work order evolved in this way. Many times we would start with a small crew, then come back with reinforcements, then call in a whole army of people because the degree of difficulty was so difficult to undertake.

This is often the case in so many areas of life. We all are that way to some extent, we present a facade to other people all the time. That's not a critique, society would be an ugly place if people were melting down at every moment. We need to keep it together to keep life livable. But this also means that we really don't often know who people really are. More often than not, we all have a lot of work to do in our lives, and sometimes it can take an army of help. But to get there we have to engage in deeper relationships which require time. I'm deeply grateful for the opportunities afforded me in my local community and my work to develop some of these relationships. They help me "clean house".

Fifth: Gratitude for the little things

Our lives are filled with luxuries down to the smallest minutia, I would argue that no king of old lived as well as we do today. But I think this takes us away from gratitude sometimes. We need something to keep us grounded in gratitude.

Every evening that I would leave the neighborhoods, I would wonder where the homeowners were sleeping that night. I had a planned "place to go" each night. I saw myself as fortunate for that simple luxury. Being near the needs of others helps us realize what we're grateful for. I suppose that's a byproduct of serving others in need. To that end, service is one of those things that is probably more important today than ever before.

Lessons

If you're still reading this, I hope it's been helpful. I'm working on applying these lessons, they're not easy to adopt in such a distracting world, so I have to remind myself. I was so impressed by the people down in Houston, they have overcome a massive amount of adversity. I hope they are able to emerge from this tragedy stronger than when they went in. I'll certainly never forget the lessons I've learned from them.