In my last post I talked about the issue of dealing with clouds of people who were willing to spend their day waiting in line. Since then I've moved away from the urban disaster recovery center to a more rural environment that includes some heavy industry and the change in environment is dramatic.
At this facility we see slightly more people who have been damaged by the floods, but there is a lot more structural damage with foundations failing due to hydrostatic pressure and some subsidance of building because the water washed out underneath the walls of the building. These are major events and repair will be time consuming and expensive and many of the people I talk to have lived in their house for several decades. They didn't anticipate their later years to be taken up with finding money to rebuild their home, spending inordanate amounts of time geting the work done and still trying to live a productive life.
Listening to an 80 year old couple tell me that they don't have insurance, live on Social Security and have no friends or family makes me proud of the resiliancy of the human spirit when they tell me that they really feel bad about asking for assistance since "there are others who need help more than I do". Old and frail they might be, but in their minds they are coping and adapting in a way I can only admire.
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