A Community United

This morning at 8 am, myself and several others from our group showed up to help shovel the ~1 foot layer of mud from the basement of our 1.5 million square foot facility. However, after about an hour or waiting, we learned that the basement was not to be entered due to no lighting and possible chemical spills that may have occurred. Instead, we split into groups and assisted members of the community with removing furniture from their homes, removing drywall, insulation, etc.

It was incredible to see how many people were doing the same thing. There wasn't a parking spot to be found up and down these streets. The people who had lost essentially everything, were nice enough to buy us pizza and drinks as we made our way through their homes. City workers were busy taking the piles of water soaked waste from people's front lawns, as well as driving around dispensing bottled water.

There were people driving around looking at the damage, which I really didn't understand, all you could see was piles of junk in peoples lawns, and as you can imagine, it all looked the same. Every once in a while you would see the police come through. I think they were looking for people looting, but to my knowledge, that hasn't been a problem.

I highly doubt we are going to be back into the office this week. I expect that up until I go to Chicago for my brothers graduation, I will be going from home to home doing what I can to help, and digging out work if at all possible. I was probably conservative on my initial estimate of 15 million. Its going to be in the area of hundreds of millions.