![]() ![]() If you faltered, your boots would sink and get stuck. Initially, the mud was so deep that you needed boards to walk across it. ![]() The smaller sizes of the group’s signature red T-shirts quickly ran out. No one expected the majority of them would be women. He hired a professional conservator to repair photo albums, artwork and documents and leased a giant freezer to rid everything of mold.Įventually, Powell put his day job aside, applied for nonprofit status and took a large pay cut to become the Bucket Brigade’s only employee. Powell’s credit cards paid to rent excavators, buy wheelbarrows and storage containers and feed volunteers. Neighbors watched in awe as buckets were passed down a line. You go, ‘Wow, I really understand what happened here and the magnitude of what it’s going to take to fix this. “You come out here to help, you stand in the mud and you smell it and your first shovelful weighs like a million pounds,” Powell, 49, said. ![]() Turned out, manual labor was enlightening. Within days, 60 people showed up with shovels and buckets. “That’s it, we’re digging him out,” the father of two told his wife, Jessica, at the dinner table. That’s when Abe Powell, founder of a solar energy company and volunteer fireman, got sick of feeling powerless. Word got around that a man with three kids and a sick wife couldn’t get a damage quote until he rid his home of thousands of pounds of mud weighing down his floors. Mud had overwhelmed the community, and insurance companies were balking. More than 125 residences destroyed, 300 damaged. The scope of wreckage was incomprehensible. The mother who clung to a mattress and her two boys as they were swept onto a roof.Īnother who clasped her daughter’s hand, only to feel it slip away.Ī man pinned against a fence who screamed his girlfriend’s name for hours. ![]()
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