[htfiremedic]

Paid.:thumb:

Use some Common Sense.
Turn around, Dont drown.

Most responders are volunteers, not all, but the vast majority in the US are. According to IAFF and IAFC, the majority are volunteers, paid responders are growing in numbers but not what most think.
FEMA will pay for responders in some cases, however criteria must be met and the $$ has to get to the correct folks for that to happen. Our Swiftwater Team went to Matthew, none of our folks saw a penny of that.


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[htfiremedic]

Keeping updated through here, and TWC at times. I'm on a 12 on the QRV Paramedic Truck in SC, so hoping that TX will "come through on the other side" to quote a song. "That's how the other side got it's name", hoping it holds true!


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[htfiremedic]

we were somewhat terrified last night, that our (newly remodeled) house would be full of water today. I was trying to think of a way to create a makeshift flood barrier, of course no one agreed with me, luckily we didn't need it.
has anyone tried something like that before? what would you use? (didn't have sand btw)

We use plastic and wood for HazMat. We make overflow and underflow type dams with them. Place a sheet of plastic over something of height, drape it towards the direction of the water, weight the base down and use something rolled into the of the plastic (think TP on the tube) bottom to make a barrier to place the weighted object on. It works fairly well, some leaks occur but it is usually manageable.


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[htfiremedic]

When I see people playing or just walking around in the water, it grosses me out. I know that at least around here, they tell us to stay out of flood water because it contains raw sewage. I guess if there's no other way, there's no other way, but floodwater doesn't mean time for watersports.

Ask GoblinX what happens in Floods! He can tell you it causes some serious issues!
@GoblinX

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[htfiremedic]

We just had a news blurb about TX requesting SC Swiftwater Rescue Teams. It has not filtered down to our two teams yet, but if I can make it I will. I have passed the info to my boss to have him look into the Hospital System's policy on this, I know that FEMA USAR and DMET teams are allowed to due to the Feds. We are local teams, on the SC Firefighter Mobilization Call List, so they are unsure of how that works.
Gotta love the powers that be, the could break an anvil with a whiffle ball bat.


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[htfiremedic]

Gas is cheaper in the disaster area than in SC! Glad to hear good news! Our crews probably won't be heading out, we lack the ability to self sustain for 14 days. With a bib get of $40k for an FD, we can't get the equipment (camper/motor home, etc) to provide for 14 souls at 14 days. It's sad that emergency services have such a poor budget, we are all volunteer and willing to come and lose our paychecks because the Oaths that we have taken are held closely to our lifestyles.


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[htfiremedic]

Orangenomad, thanks for the postings since Harvey hit. And I'm glad y'all are safe. We rode it out here at home in Ingleside, and it got exciting for a while around midnight.



Oxy plant about a mile west of us had their weather station recording 12+ hours at >100mph and right at 6 hrs >130mph.



Lost internet Friday morning, and cell service by about 3 pm Friday. Electric went out a couple hours after that, water failed by midnight. As far as external utilities, all we had was natural gas and a trickle of water gravity-flowing from a ground tank (no tower serving this neighborhood) but it was enough to refill the toilet tank for a flush every six hours or so.



Water came back on Sunday morning, if I recall correctly, when the city got a generator hooked up to one of the six pumping stations in town and got the whole city low flow, boil-order quality water....but it DID get us water. Next thing back was cell service. Text only, though, and no data signal to speak of. That came Monday or Tuesday.



Electric came back on day 11. Just enough time to get used to not having it. Wife and I were sitting out front, b.s.'ing with neighbors, she had her back to the house, neighbor and I were sitting sideways, where we could see what might be coming up the street. I turned to her to say something and was looking at her funny, took me a while to figure out what was different. After about 5 minutes I figured it out: The porch light was on! ::



Neighbors had left Friday morning when they narrowed the cone to landfall at/near Rockport and both their boys showed up (they lived in Rkpt) with all the grands in tow, and grandma decided they were NOT staying. They got back Wednesday. I finally got contact with 'em Saturday afternoon when we drove inland about 30 miles to Sinton to refill gas jugs and found a textable cell signal. Upshot of it is, I broke into their house and plugged their fridge and freezer into my genny, and managed to even save the ice cream! The grands were tickled when they got home and found ICE CREAM! :upsidedown: : : (It's the little things, ya know? )



Saturday morning, wife and I lit out to go check on mom and sis, who rode it out at sis's house about a mile from me. Never got there. Downed trees everywhere, mixed with power lines. Spent about an hour like a rat in a maze, and broke off of that to go check on son who had stayed at mom's house on the bay, to make sure he was ok. On the way back through town, saw sister's neighbor. He said he'd laid eyes on mom and sis and they were okay, so we went on with our rat-killing and checked out the area since we were out. I have pics, but we still don't have internet back reliably enough to upload. In fact, it is out right now, and I've blown my fast data on my cell plan by about a week. (Text-based sites are about all I can access without dozing off waiting.) I'll upload some as I can.



ZERO help arrived until really Sunday afternoon, and that was in the form of individuals, industry with a local presence, and semi-local churches. By Tuesday or Wednesday there was LOTS of volunteer help in the area, from unmarked pickup trucks loaded with ice chests passing out cold water bottles to anyone they saw, to gangs roving the streets.... with chainsaws and gas cans, just jumping in and helping. Refusing money, might I add. Only thing they would accept is a little gas for their saws if someone had it to spare, and it was almost like pulling teeth to get 'em to accept that. Pickup trucks pulling utility trailers loaded with buckets and several guys setting off at each house a 5 gal bucket with some water bottles, trash bags, and energy bars. These were from places like Dupont, Oxy, etc.



It was AMAZING to see how everyone was so polite and pulled together. Of course, it probably helped the politeness aspect that open carry was almost universal. Permit or no, EVERYONE was armed, it seemed. That made for a very very polite society :thumb:



Oh, I forgot. Red Cross finally did show up AFTER the first sweep of the brush trucks through the neighborhood. They passed out shovels. And candy bars. And universally denied EVERY request for any other assistance. Then got called on that and revised their website to "apologize" and that everyone who requested would be given $400 to help with expenses due to the storm, within 24 hours of requesting it, and then proceeded to ignore those requests for going on two weeks now, from what I'm told.



Really didn't get any outside-the-state gov't help at a level that we could actually SEE here, except for NG presence and a temp FEMA office. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of money being provided to the cities and counties to cover the brush and debris haul-off, but I'm not sure if that's state or fed money coming in. By the time the NG and FEMA showed up, it was time for rebuild. The "digging out" phase was done here in town. Streets were passable, not clear by any stretch, we're still driving over downed wires in places, and the town looks like a gypsy camp with all the tarps/shower curtains/tents/whatever is water repellent stretched over roofs.



What have we learned here?



Well, water wasn't an issue, for one. City was real good about keeping enough flow to flush and getting a little pressure back quickly. Drinking water is all we needed to have stored ....THIS TIME



Electricity is important. Air conditioning is not. Gasoline is not storable in the quantities one needs for 11 days of a/c, for several reasons. Main one being that rotating that much fuel is a PITA, and the flip side is that it's simply not available when you'd need to go grab it right before the blow. We ran genny 4 on, 8 off and never lost the frost line in the chest deep freezer. Remember I said that we saved that ice cream?



Electricity is important in SMALL amounts readily available, like for a light for the 30 min or so after dark sneaks up on ya and there's still stuff to do before bed. Enter the battery and inverter setup. We made do with a Group 65 battery out of an old 4020 John Deere and a 400 watt inverter. It served us well during the storm and after. During the landfall phase, we were able to turn on the tv hourly and catch the updates. (No cable television, we have an antenna on the roof that amazingly made it through in working order!) Broadcast television's antennas are about 50-60 miles southwest of us, and were not affected by Harvey.



Coffee is very important too. Have a percolator or boiler on hand. Kinda stupid to run a huge generator just to power Mr. Coffee! We have a couple of gallon coffee boilers and they were busy busy busy for that 11 days. Seems we provided drinkable coffee every morning to about half the block. (No, it wasn't a take-take situation, people were bringing more ground coffee than we could use. They just couldn't/didn't know how to turn it into something drinkable without electricity. I was happy to do it for 'em, built up a LOT of goodwill and 99% of them expressed that both in words and recently in deeds.)



Natural gas or propane is a must. We were cooking as normal but with flashlights or a clamp light hooked to the vent hood : and could've even used the oven had I drug the inverter in there to plug in the stove's electronics. Those with electric stoves were S.O.L., in that you can't plug a cookstove into a generator.



Stores are useless about an hour after they reopen. Shelves are bare almost immediately, and communications are down so any re-ordering is manual, and rife with errors and oversights.



Stores might not physically survive, too. The Lowe's here had its back wall blow in. Coincidentally, the wall that blew in was the wall where the sprinkler system controls were. Sprinklers came on for 4 1/2 hours, and ruined the entire stock of the store, along with it being blown around like the contents of a cyclone vacuum cleaner. They're down til Thanksgiving. Only store of its type for 30 miles. To their credit, they did get the lumber end open within a couple weeks and had lines like crazy, but they were doing their best! :thumb:



What would I do differently? Store more diesel. I ran the full tank out of the tractor in the first few days, then it sat until I could find more. Took me a day or two. Kept enough in it to help if it was REALLY needed but it would've been handy as heck to push more brush out of the alley etc. before the first sweep of the brush cleanup.



Another thing I'm going to do differently is get one of those 3-way fuel adapters for my Chinese Honda knockoff genny, where I can run it on the natural gas supply, or a propane pig (which will grace my back yard with its presence shortly) yet still retain the gasoline-burning ability. Options are good, and having natural gas was a fluke. A tree branch came down and landed on my fence and the ground in the alley, bridging the meter. Luck, providence, call it what you will, but we ALMOST didn't have gas. Propane stores forever, so long as you can keep it inside the tank :



Enough of my novel here. I'm going to copy all this before hitting "submit", just in case it doesn't go through. We're getting there, but it'll be YEARS before we're back to normal from Ingleside up through, say, Seadrift.

Any idea of a source for the GenSet adaptor? I have a TroyBilt, 7-10k, and want that as a backup for it.


HT

 

[htfiremedic]

Thanks!


HT