When I was growing up, Main Street, with its beautiful architecture, shaded by huge tulip poplars, sycamores and elms was considered the most exclusive of neighborhoods by the locals who called it Million Dollar Avenue. I had often wondered what those huge popular trees, which we all so loved, would do to our house if they ever came crashing down.
A Favor From Far Away
That night all our beautiful trees, save one, did come down and all fell in the same direction as if some enormous air-burst bomb had detonated nearby. Most of them penetrated the roof in some fashion; some just pushed the stumps of limbs through the roof like daggers; on others the full force of the enormous trunks impacted the roof and obliterated entire sections of the roof framing.
The one tree that didn’t come down was as enormous as any and by all rights should have come down directly on the portion of the house, not ten yards away, where my mother, ninety-four years old, sharp as a tack but deaf as a post and could not hear the storm was sleeping.
Earlier she had refused to leave her apartment and come into the larger house to a ‘place of safety’ -- -- saying, “One place is a good as another”. Call that one as you see it, but I see it as a lucky favor from far away.
A Place Of Safety
My sister Charlotte and her husband Lawrence, who live in the house proper, did go to a place of safety in the hallway as the vortex bore down on them sounding for the entire world like a squadron of jet fighters with the after burners kicked-in and making a run at tree top level. As they waited in the hallway, the world went dark and the house shuddered from tree impacts as the plaster ceilings of our great house shattered like melting ice on a frozen pond.
After midnight I was awoken by a phone call, the message relayed from Lawrence’s cell phone saying that the house had been hit and our trees were down. Lawrence had called while walking a quarter-mile to check on his mother. Fortunately her house was on the cusp of the storm and completely undamaged.
Can You Spell Disoriented
It is actually hard for me to imagine how he found his way on that difficult night, through a driving rain and with nothing but a flashlight. How disorienting, even in daylight, such a landscape with all familiar landmarks destroyed or obscured by debris, trees and their limbs is difficult to relate. In that situation you become quiet conscious of how the mind clings to familiar checkpoints and becomes quiet disoriented and intemperate when that familiarity suddenly disappears.
That is exactly the experience I had when I arrived on Main Street the next morning; our street was simply and literally unrecognizable with every imaginable sort of debris and the prone trunks of our destroyed, majestic trees which had pulled their enormous root balls out of the ground as they went over and left the ground cratered with shell-holes.
A Good Start
With a lot of help we got off to a remarkable start. We had about thirty people; two hundred feet of one inch manila rope and a wild man, chain saw wielding genius and we pulled those enormous tree trunks off the roof in tug-a-war fashion and had it tarped out in a single day. When I had first stood on the roof that morning, I would have just about bet the farm that nothing short of a crane would have gotten those trees off the roof.
It was exhausting and noisy work, working with chainsaws and a generator, carrying each piece of equipment or material over the trunks of felled trees, taking the single generator off the work line to charge the refrigerator, bringing everything in over the congested streets clogged with sightseers and no hot water and no hot food.
Later the local police would needlessly add to the misery and frustration by setting up road blocks where they mindlessly wouldn’t let you in even if everybody in town knew you and even if you had a driver’s license that identified you as a resident of Main Street and even if you had your ninety-three year old mother in the front seat with you and desperately needed to get her home.
Is This A Turd I See Before Me?
Such a situation is the very definition of frustration and after a long while of it every petty thing tends to enrage you; even the accomplishment of the simplest task is encumbered by obstacles that magnify the difficulty beyond reckoning. It is a constant and wearing drain on the mind and body and it gets worse and worse as time goes on. The exhilaration of our initial accomplishments faded and the weeks slogged into a long and hot summer with grim work ahead.
We had a contractor’s crew in to repair the roof, but they proved to be oblivious to the finer points of long range planning and sorely lacking in respect for the craftsmanship and architectural detail of our house.
One day they left the roof uncovered, just left the job, during a driving rain with the roof uncovered and the next day one of them insulted me and my family by defecating and leaving a actual human turd on our roof.
Well that was that; I refuse to write checks for anyone who takes a shit on my roof -- -- I fired them!
So, I took on the role of contractor for myself, camping out in the chaos that was now our house while dealing with the insurance issues and planning the individual projects whose completions would lead to restoration and moving back in day.
Lessons Learned
I knew a bit about contracting because I am a carpenter and sometime subcontractor; fitting the pieces of that puzzle together was not all that hard for me. But I knew absolutely nothing about insurance or how to get a decent settlement. We needed a nice pile of money to get our house back the way it was, but on that account, the insurance threw us a very low ball and for eight long weeks the bills we submitted went unpaid and calls unreturned.
As those weeks went on and on and got hotter and hotter, in the middle of a long summer night, while I slept in the house, we were robbed and just about all of my tools were stolen, almost certainly by one of our subs. I guess the police vigilance stopped with the road blocks because they did not follow up with a proper investigation and I had to read them the riot act just to get a proper police report out of them.
My mother was in an assisted living center, costing us twenty five hundred dollars a month and we would not be compensated because we had not considered assisted living when the insurance company asked what was needed for housing expenses.
Lessons learned: the first rule of dealing with a restoration from a natural disaster is to remember that such events act as a strange attractor to some people who want to screw you; the second is to remember that not everyone who is sup-post to back you up will and the third is to be very careful what you ask the insurance company for because once they write you a check for something there is no going back.
Twisted Things And Unsavory Characters
It was indeed a long and hot summer; tempers flared and our family, which had always gotten along, couldn’t get along.
Each setback just added a bit more weight to the misery scale. It was an unforgettable summer of nightmarish images of twisted and broken things and unsavory characters that you have no choice but to deal with.
I mourned for our house; I was nostalgic for the time when it was brand new and full of promise. I wanted to restore the house to its full promise and along with it the promise and optimism that our family had when my sisters and parents, before my time, moved into the house.
Those Who Helped
To be fair there were lots of people who helped us too: There were the Episcopals who fed us and the Baptist who bought in those heavy machines and pulled out those enormous root balls and dumped them on the curb for us. There was Joel from the State Farm agency in Birmingham and neighbor / business man Tom Babcock who tutored me on how to conduct an insurance claim.
It was a damn hard summer, but I do not mean to complain; we got back everything we lost! Just over a year later, in this very state over two hundred people would perish from tornadoes in a single day. Many people suffered losses that they cannot hope to recover in this world; really there are no words; I am truly sorry and may God bless you.
And last, but certainly not least, there was that lean and keen machine called FEMA; we did not personally qualify for their help, but they helped innumerable people. If you ask me, government isn’t the answer except when it is the answer and I wouldn’t care to have a natural disaster without them around.
Moving Back In Day
Over four long months we evaluated our options and implemented repairs to our house while learning enough about the business to get a fair settlement from an uncooperative insurance company. And we improvised new techniques and found new materials to replace those on our house that were obsolete; anyone handling an insurance claim or anyone with a carpenter-ly frame of mind will likely find my future post of interest -- -- stand by.
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