Submarines, Deep Cleans, and Trampolines

Today's view from the ground: Espy, Pennsylvania

In the above photo, volunteers shovel mud out of the South Bloomsburg home of noted baseball coach John Babb Thursday morning after the south wall collapsed during last week's flood. The house was condemned later that day.

Thursday morning brought me to the side of Bloomsburg that faces the Susquehanna. Like the Fishing Creek end of town, this part had not only flooded but was also ground up under the fierce current of the wild river. Nearly half of the affected part of West Bloomsburg is part of the fairgrounds; the fair was cancelled the day earlier and the local paper bore the headline "It's No Fair." South Bloomsburg's affected area is nothing but homes and schools. It was a horror show.

The inspection team roved up and down the streets as backhoes and dump trucks hauled the bulk of people's possessions off to be dumped in a heap on the high school parking lot. Few houses were not heavily damaged. Many had to be condemned on the spot. The current had swept them off of their foundations, claimed a wall or two, or left several feet of standing water in the basements. A crew of twenty spent all morning trying to save the 11th Street house that belongs to a local beloved baseball coach, only to have it condemned just before noon. That decision came after a cinder-block wall nearly collapsed on a group of volunteers clearing mud and masonry out of the basement.

Most people took the news of the red tag with resignation, if not the relief I had seen in Fernville the day before. Several of them had been waiting for days to see if they should be planning a return or moving on with their lives. A few people who had spent their lives in their homes and survived earlier floods with them looked and sounded as if the foundations of their lives were undermined as well as that of their houses. Agape wisely had a group of crisis counselors, including my mother, ready to listen to some of the heartbreaking stories coming out of the south side of town.

West Bloomsburg was getting worse. The inspectors had already been through there, and the time had come for tough decisions. I stopped in on a woman on West Main Street who had walled herself into her second floor with her four cats. She showed me around the first floor, with its beautiful tongue-and-groove paneling, old solid-wood furniture, and an upright piano. Most of it was going to be thrown away. She had cleverly stood a HEPA filter against a box fan to avoid the expensive air filters people were using to keep their first floors safe. In her case, it was too late. Mold was already appearing in the walls and cabinets as dust from the drying mud blew in and out. To make it worse, she is asthmatic. I warned her to wear a mask and take several outdoor breaks while she packed up what she could save. She mostly needed someone who didn't live there to come in and give her a fresh opinion on the place. Even though mine wasn't positive, she seemed relieved. I have become a crisis counselor for houses.

As we were talking, a man I knew from years ago came in from the back porch without knocking. West Bloomsburg has always been that kind of neighborhood. He asked to borrow a roll of duct tape. He then showed us why: he was putting a "For Sale By Owner" sign on his front door. The woman I was talking to shortly followed suit. Some property speculators have already begun to make handshake deals, relieving flood-weary residents of their water-logged homes for the price of a new car. Most people here wouldn't sell at such a low rate except for their exhaustion, which was a problem in 2006.

Most of the houses I saw condemned this week may have survived even Lee's record flooding if it were not for shoddy construction and repair work done five years ago. Many people, desperate to return home and not go through the trouble of moving out for proper renovation, hired contractors from out of state with their government disaster subsidies to put in new walls and utilities that would just make it past the hurried inspections that followed. I found Styrofoam used in place of Fiberglass for insulation, two-by-fours spaced too far apart replacing plaster and lath, and - the granddaddy of construction no-nos - cracks and missing pieces of foundations, filled in (if at all) improperly with the wrong materials. Many houses, some more than a century old, got the ax this week because of a shortsighted job done half a decade ago. After Katrina, when the same thing was happening on the Gulf, we called the offending contractors "submarines," as they popped up to do the job and then disappeared, avoiding responsibility later.

A team was pulling plaster and lath out of a century-old house on West First Street which had been spared the red tag. Inside the walls, I found a brown newspaper - the North American, a Philadelphia publication that became the syndicate of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short career as a journalist and Ernest Hemingway's coverage of the Spanish Civil War. That was all still to come when this paper had been nailed to the wall. It was from 1905 and bore stories about President Theodore Roosevelt's policies and the Russo-Japanese War. I was in the wrong crowd to fascinate others with the find, but took the liberty of snapping a few photos before the paper turned to dust in my hand.

I then stopped at The Crimson Lion, Main Street's hookah lounge, where Rachel (who survived a car accident just before the flood) made me a butter beer, a warm combination of cream and cinnamon that helped clear out my ailing nose. I had one more day in which I needed to breathe through masks and dust.

Yesterday, I was sent to Espy, the long line of a town between Bloomsburg and Berwick along the Susquehanna's northern bank. Few buildings were spared damage, and my trip there was when I hit the "Katrina watermark," an expression some psychotraumatologists use for when someone has had enough of this type of situation.

As you can see above, every house on Old Berwick Road had a stack of ruined possessions waiting on the shoulder to be collected and carted off. Most basements had water and mud in them. Many people were dismayed to see their private lives collected in a public pile about to be destroyed further. The smell hanging in the wet air is one that will always remind me of New Orleans' Elysian Field Avenue and the destruction we saw there. A beautiful Victorian home in Espy, built in 1864, had scooted off its base and had to be condemned despite the woeful objection of the owner. It broke our hearts to do it, but any attempt to make it habitable would not be covered by the insurance and there is no room for error when the decision is made for someone to live there safely. Fortunately, most houses in Espy can be repaired.

An Agape crew of teenagers from Benton, the town nearest to our home, were enthusiastically helping clear out mud, appliances, and possessions. In one house, they removed a washer, a dryer, two water heaters, a tool stand, a set of shelves, and hundreds of gallons of mud and water. In another, they removed hundreds of old toys from a basement, including a small trampoline, which was very useful in increasing the bounce factor on throwing things away from a long distance.

Everyone had been working long enough that it was necessary to laugh. One person had a sign outside his filth-ridden home saying "Welcome to the Mud Pit. Please wipe your feet." One of the Benton people said "What, on the way out?" Benton itself got heavily damaged in the flooding of Fishing Creek, but most people have their affairs under control and the locals are already helping elsewhere. It reminded me that I had never seen such a concerted local effort, although I admit I am rarely in situations where help from elsewhere is not there (I am usually part of the help from elsewhere). It is not just that people know what they are doing. It is that they are used to doing what is necessary and neither expecting nor waiting for help. Dad calls it "the real rugged individualism," as opposed to the kind we see on television. It will take a long time to recover from Lee, but it will happen.

The inspection teams calculated that Lee destroyed more than 1000 homes and damaged 9000 more in Columbia County alone. Although the county is one of the least populous in the Susquehanna River Valley, it bore the most destruction. It is one of the prices of having such beautiful waterways: they occasionally come up to visit. Relief continues as the nights get colder. Hopefully, recovery is not too far around the corner.

That's the view from the ground.