You may not know that Spork and I have joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) this year. In a nutshell, CAP is the civilian auxiliary to the US Air Force and performs non-combat missions stateside for the Air Force. This includes Emergency Services (ES) as a core function of CAP. ES includes search and rescue and disaster relief (read Hurricanes!)
Up to now it’s been meetings, orientation flights, and training but with hurricane Matthew giving us such a smack, we were activated and asked to go down East to provide relief support. That means we were off farm for a few days. It also meant we were running around like crazy before we left because we’d lost power, we had power lines down in the road, and we’d lost our main backup generator. A sensor had gone bad in the generator ON THE DAY of the hurricane. Not damaged, just quit working! Can you believe that terrible luck?!
We had enough portable generators to run most of the freezers and refrigerators but not all. This meant a continuous swapping of freezers to generators. Since we’re on a well for our water, it also meant we needed to power the well off and on so people could cook, take cold showers, etc.
It sounds worse than it was. I’ve done this before, many times, and my backups have backups so we were able to handle it. Plus everyone on the farm pitched in and we had lots of hands for each task making for light work. I’d also bought a new generator this year, a Honda EU2000, which turned out to be just as awesome as everyone said it would be. Portable power to run most things, quiet, and easy to carry around. Plus it uses almost no gas. I already have forgotten how I lived without this thing. However, having to pack, and deploy in the middle of it all was a new wrinkle so if you’ve been looking for me, wondering why I haven’t answered your question/email/voice mail. That’s why.
I’ll speak more about the trip later, and the rescue mission, but for now, we are back and starting to catch up. Step one was to get a shower and hand our grungy clothes to SWMBO for washing. Spork thought any mission where showers were not only not optional but hardly possible was pretty cool. Ahh boys. You gotta love ’em.