Final Thoughts About Hurricane Laura

Before this storm, I had a pretty set schedule of posting on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.  I didn't post on Wednesday night because of church.  Then I'd post on Thursday and take Friday and Saturday off.  Since Hurricane Laura, I've been working late every night straight and haven't had much time to post.  I'm just tired.

Blogging is a therapeutic thing for me.  It is like journaling and gives me the opportunity to think and compose my thoughts.  Our posting schedule may be abbreviated for a while until things get back to normal.  Tonight I'll tell you a little about what I do at my "real" job.  I am a plant manager at an oil company in Sulphur, Louisiana.  We distribute fuel and lubricants to our customers, farmers, loggers, business and industry.

When Laura bore down with all her fury on our location, our focus was on helping our community in the restoration process.  With the power grid down for weeks, people needed diesel to run generators to begin the reconstruction process, to have lights and to keep cool. As soon as the winds stopped blowing, we were there.

Below is a photo of our office after the storm.  The front awning was in some trees 500 feet to the south and west.  Parts of the roof were gone and the sign blown down.  All of the windows were blown out.  Coming up on 3 weeks since the storm, we still have no commercial power - just generator power.

One can only imagine the strength of the hurricane as it shattered every window in the building except one.

The reception area/lobby was in shambles.  Prior to the storm, I was able to rescue the computers, copiers, phones, etc., but the devastation on the building was extensive. 

Employees in our field of work know that when things like this happen, it is imperative that we get back to work.  Our dispatcher's home is a total loss.  Everyone else has extensive damage, no power, no water, but yet they returned to work - dependable, loyal, hard-working individuals with whom I am proud to work alongside.

The President of our company paid for tree removal companies to cut trees off of roofs and put tarps on roofs and loaned generators, leased campers, provided meals and fuel so that people could work to restore the community without having the overwhelming burden of dealing with the loss of their own property.  I wrote the following messages on our boarded up front door:

Eighteen hour days for 18 days.  Our team worked hard and are still working hard, delivering fuel and rebuilding our community.  Resilient.  Strong.  They get knocked down, but get up again.  It may be a long road, but we'll be back.  In fact, it is getting better every day.  Early one morning while loading his truck with 4,400 gallons of off-road diesel to deliver, I snapped the photo below of one of our drivers named "Boogie."  He is sporting his best Superman pose.

As I sit here tonight and reflect on the past 3 weeks, I am reminded of a quote that I put on a yellow sticky I have taped to the monitor of my computer:

I think the cycle that this quote points to has been true throughout history.  With good times, men feel bullet-proof and like to take credit for their achievement.  In doing so, they become soft and hard times come.  They leave God out of the equation.  Hard times come and go.  We are never promised ease and prosperity and absence of trial.  If we keep our eyes fixed on Him, when hard times come, with His Strength, we can rise above the circumstances, endure discomfort, and find that good times will once again come.  Thank you, God, for being a strong tower, a rock, a fortress in times of trouble.

The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock

When I was a kid in Sunday School, we learned the song, "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock."

The wise man built his house upon the rock,

The wise man built his house upon the rock,

The wise man built his house upon the rock,

And the rains came tumbling down!

The rains came down and the floods came up,

The rains came down and the floods came up,

The rains came down and the floods came up,

And the house on the rock stood firm.

Of course the song was about building your life, your hopes, your dreams, your eternity on faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  Many people build their "houses" on the shifting sands of success, money, recognition, fame, and the like.  When storms come, their houses are decimated.  When eternity comes calling, well, those that don't know the Lord will be tragically separated from God.

In today's post, I'll show a few more storm damage photos.  As we drove down the road, the first thing we came to was our church.  We noticed that our sign had blown over and that many shingles were missing, but the main thing was that the high winds had blown our steeple over.

Superficial damage, mainly.  There was some ceiling damage to the church along with other minor issues, but really not much compared to many other people nearby.

We drove on to Welsh, Louisiana, a town 10 miles to our west where our son, Russ, lives.  Hurricane Laura moved in to the coast about 40 miles south and west of us.  The closer you move west, the more destruction.  We were saddened when we drove up to Russ' home.  His neighbors had a large water oak tree that fell over his house and onto his roof, puncturing the roof in numerous places.

You can see in the photo below that the tree was hollowed out and weak and should have been cut down prior to the storm.

While we were sad for a minute, we began to work to clear the tree from his house.  The whole family pitched in to work.  It was hot, but we pressed on.  

We pulled limbs to the side of the road, building a big windrow that blocked off the view of the road.  The town crews will come to pick up the limbs.  They've got their work cut out for them (pardon the pun.)

Slowly, we made headway.  Inch by inch, it's a cinch!  

As more and more of the tree was removed, we could clearly see the extent of the damage.  When the tree fell through the roof, it damaged the house structurally and it rained in the house, causing more damage.

Thankfully, Russ has insurance and the adjuster has already come to inspect the damage.  We pray that Russ will be made whole.  

When we finished, we realized that the larger parts of the tree would have to be removed by professionals.  The large parts of the trunk leaned against the house and threatened additional damage.

The goal was to remove the tree and put up a tarp to prevent further damage by rainfall.

At the end of the day, I think we accomplished that.  Although Russ is sad, so many people lost so much more.  We are truly blessed and grateful.

We Survived Hurricane Laura

We're back!  We survived Hurricane Laura.  In the next several posts, I'll report on what's been going on.  In the last post before going silent, I reported about the impending storm.  We hunkered down that night, preparing for the arrival of severe tropical weather.  As we walked outside prior to the storm, we noticed an eerie phenomenon of dragonflies swarming.  I've never seen this before.  It was as if they were predicting some bad weather and were taking flight to evacuate.

It became nightfall as the weather deteriorated.  There's something about a bad storm at night that makes it worse.  The sounds of the wind howling, things banging into the house, and then the beeping of electronics as the power goes out.  Tricia and I and Russ and Benjamin rode it out in our room.  We were silent at times and then prayed many times as the storm reached it's crescendo around 2 am.  It seemed as if things didn't begin to settle down until around 4 am. 

I went outside and walked around in the high wind around 5:30.  I quickly realized that was not a good decision and got back inside.  In the morning we walked around and surveyed the damage.  We were blessed.  Our home was spared.  We have many large limbs and branches down and will not have to worry about firewood this year.

The top half of a Chinaberry tree fell across the gate in the back, crushing it.  We quickly bent it back into shape so that the cows, goats, and chickens could not get out.

The powerful storm stripped the leaves off of the trees, leaving (pardon the pun) the ground full of leaves for the goats to devour.

So although we were slightly on the east side of the storm's path, we escaped a lot of the damage that our friends, family and co-workers experienced nearby.  At Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we've been 'radio silent' for a little over a week for several reasons.  We were without electrical service for a little over a week.  The second reason is that I work for an oil company that distributes fuel, oil, and lubes.  We are required to go to work shortly after the winds stop blowing to return to work and get fuel (mainly diesel) to run generators to begin the rebuilding process.  Recovery doesn't take place unless fuel is delivered and tanks are constantly filled. 

Once the power grid goes down, generators fueled by diesel keeps people and perishables cool, and allows people to work to remove debris and wreckage and then rebuild.  Our recovery is not powered by wind and solar.  After a week, our electrical power was restored, but not in Sulphur, Louisiana, where I work.  My coworkers lost their homes and barns.  They don't have electricity or running water.  We've been working 18 hour days to try to meet an impossibly large demand for fuel.  Tonight I'm home a little early, but the work continues for the foreseeable future without an end in sight.

I'll post as often as my work schedule allows.  Thanks for checking in on us!

Expensive Fertilizer for the Garden

Last week we had some phenomenal lines of thunderstorms blow through, bringing with them torrential downpours of rain.  I measured 4.8 inches in my rain gauge, but there's no telling how much we really got. My rain gauge only has a 5 inch capacity, and I'm sure some splashed out of the top.  We also got some very strong straight-line winds, with gusts as high as 60 miles per hour.

Needless to say, this was not good weather for the meat birds in our new chicken tractor.  I was concerned about the birds and kept running out the front door and walking on the porch toward the west side of the house and peering out, trying to catch a glimpse of our Cornish Cross meat birds between the blowing wind and rain that battered my face.

You see, it was hard to see because our power was out.  It went out at 8 p.m. and didn't come back on again until noon the next day.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind the cassette a bit. There was a tornado warning in effect, we had no power, and it was raining cats and dogs.  At one point I thought I saw the tarp blow off the chicken tractor.  I told Tricia that I was going to wait until it slacked up a bit to go check on the birds.

At about 10:30 the wind slowed a little and there appeared to be a break in the rain. We both put on our slicker suits and rubber boots and walked across the backyard toward the area where the chicken tractor was positioned.  My flashlight brought the chicken tractor into view.  Something wasn't right!  The chicken tractor lay on its side.  The wind had flipped it over.  As I panned across the yard with the beam of my light, I saw what appeared to be white rags littering the landscape in a 50 square foot area.  The wind must have knocked over someone's garbage cans.  Wait a minute - those aren't rags!  Those are birds.  Our birds!  Our soaking wet, shivering, half-dead birds.  I picked up the first bird I came to.  It was dead.  I turned to Tricia and said, "We lost all of our birds."  But as we walked around, there weren't all dead.  Some were alive.  Thank you, Lord.

I flipped the chicken tractor over.  It was in good shape.  Tricia helped me to walk around and pick up every single bird.  Some were dead - three for sure.  I stacked their cold carcasses outside the tractor.   The rest were suffering from the effects of hypothermia. Since our power was out, I couldn't turn the heat lamp on and warm them up.  I did the next best thing.  I stacked them very close together inside the chicken tractor where their body heat could warm each other up.

The next morning at 5 a.m. I wasn't sure what would be awaiting us.  Would ANY of the chickens be alive?  I opened the door and heard some chirping.  There were birds looking back at me - definitely alive.  In all 13 meat birds succumbed to the effects of the stormy weather.  When I got back from work in the evening, I carried several buckets of dead chickens to the place of interment.

When you hear the term "Bucket of Chicken," you normally think KFC - not this gruesome sight!!

With a few minutes of manual labor behind the familiar handle of a shovel, I dug a trench between the garden rows from last year's garden and deposited the fallen fowl into the shallow grave. I fashioned a crude cross for the 13 meat birds' final resting place, and God providentially sent rays of sunlight to illuminate the chicken cemetery.

Now I must remember, it could have been worse.  Much, much worse.  Maybe 8 or 10 years ago, I lost every single bird after a rain storm.  25 meat birds that were healthy and about the size of Cornish hens were dead.  We only lost 13 of the birds this time.

I also learned a lesson.  Although the center of gravity is low on the new chicken tractor, if we are expecting strong winds, I need to be diligent about staking the chicken tractor down and getting out to check on the birds EVEN BEFORE the storm subsides.  If I would have gotten out there a little earlier, I might have saved them all.

There is a silver lining to this sad story.   Like the Indian's fish provided nutrients to the pilgrim's growing corn, the chickens' dead carcasses will do the same later this year, feeding our vegetables and providing a bumper crop of delicious vegetables.  It's just doggone expensive fertilizer!