I am posting it now, not because of the goofball with the rice cakes and the boonie hat, but because look at what a sweet little place it was. Everything was so homey and tidy and tucked in.
Look at all this great stuff! Kombu! Nori! Soba noodles! Fish sauce! Coconut milk! Gretchen's hot sauce! Jam! Sardines! Kippers!!
And that's just a fraction of what was there.
It probably didn't hurt that Thrive Appalachia announced that they would be arriving with tacos and tres leches cake.
The job involved a lot of this
and a lot of this.
The overall situation is certainly daunting. But it was a beautiful afternoon, it was great to be outside with a big group of neighbors, and the stuff we picked up needed to be picked up. We do what we can.
Also tacos.
Normally we go to some trouble to not touch the water so we won't contaminate it, but this water had been sitting for way too long to be a usable sample, so we decided to sample it ourselves. Despite all the trouble this storm caused, the water was delicious.
Unlike some folks, Eben's family has not had a good experience dealing with FEMA, so for Halloween, he decided to scare people with red tape.
Hey, South Toe Precinct voters. You all got cards a couple of months ago letting you know that our polling place is being moved from South Toe Elementary to Browns Creek Baptist Church.
This is to let you know that we were supposed to be using the basement of the church, but it was damaged in the flood, so we will be voting in a large tent that’s sitting at the edge of the parking lot. It has power, a floor, heat and there are port-a-johns and handwashing stations outside.
A number of people have asked me why the polling place was moved. The answer is simple. Holding elections in schools is a conflict with the school schedule and activities. For general elections all the county schools are closed so that a few of them can be used as polling places. During primaries, the schools stay open, but the parts that are used for the election can’t be used for school that day, and it means a lot of people and vehicles are coming in and out of the parking lot and the building while school is not in session.
Both the Board of Education and the Board of Elections have been working for years to move the polling places out of the schools. South Toe was one of only two that were still using a school for the elections. My assumption is that for the 2026 election we will be using the church basement, but this year we will be in this tent provided by the State Board of Elections.
It's impossible to convey the actual scale of the destruction that resulted from tropical storm Helene, but Alma was kind enough to help me show the scale of some of the debris that was on the bridge down by the Celo Inn. This was all cleared a couple of days later by a guy with a track hoe, which turns out to be an incredibly useful tool in this situation.
And here's Tammy giving some perspective to how high the water got. She standing next to a low-lying spot on Hannah Branch Road. You can barely see the river water through the brush, but where she is standing is 7 or 8 feet above the normal level of the river. You can see about how high the flood got by the sticks and mud caught in the tree.
Tal Galton and some kids did careful observations and measurements on a tree that's close to the gauging station that measures the river level. That station quit working at 12-1/2 feet (it was underwater after that). They concluded that the level during this flood was 26.25 feet, +/- a few inches, which is nearly 9’ higher than 1977, the previously highest recorded flood on this river.
It's also hard to convey the scale and generosity of the response to this disaster. The rain stopped around 11:00 AM on Friday, September 27. I took this picture at around 3:00 that same afternoon. This is the assistant chief of the volunteer fire department and a local machine operator with a track hoe beginning to clear our road.
