June 01, 2014

Surviving the Jamestown Flood

These blog posts by "Roger I." were written in September and October 2013, but I just now discovered them. They describe his and his wife's life in the first month after their mountain community, Jamestown, west of Boulder, was clobbered in last September's northern-Colorado flooding.

There is good stuff here on the psychology of disasters and on who makes it and who does not do so well. And humor: "Using  software engineers as pack animals is always an iffy proposition, but after some training, Nate did great."

He has kinder things to say about FEMA than did many Hurricanes Katrina and Rita survivors —  whether due to the agency learning some lessons or to the smaller scale of the disaster plus a different local culture, you can decide.

(Via Peter Grant.)

1 comment:

Nancie N Bartley said...

Very interesting. If he does an update, will you share it with us?
I'm about to conclude a 10 month stay in my Colorado cabin and return to Big City TX. For someone who has had limited experience with snow and winter, this has been an interesting year. For someone who has never lived in the country, it has been at times challenging. What started out as a romp (bring two teenage girls and a dog to live in the cabin for a lovely Fall semester of school) has turned into an exercise of plumbing repairs, car repairs, snow shoveling and priority rearranging.
Now that the girls have completed the entire school year, I have asked both of them whether this adventure was worth it and they both said absolutely positively YES. Definitely we have all learned more about self reliance than we ever could have in the suburbs.