Spent the day with a crew in Hunt yesterday. I’ve seen hundreds of pictures, videos, and read of the personal accounts, but nothing can really prepare you for it. Pictures and videos don’t do it justice. Surprisingly, I only teared up a few times. It’s just so overwhelming that you almost instantly go numb. The destruction is beyond words, and the amount of work still left to do is incalculable. Most humbling thing I’ve ever done. Roughly a hundred combined man hours amongst us, and at the end of the day, you wouldn’t even know we had been there.
It is pretty amazing to see so many people from different walks of life all over the place just doing what they can. You’ve got guys running heavy equipment, folks with shovels, rakes, chainsaws, groups of women/children/olds sifting through debris recovering personal belongings, came across several groups of foreigners that hardly spoke English (obviously a lot of Mexicans, but I heard some Germans and then another group speaking a language I was unfamiliar with but sounded Slavic), groups running long rows of grills cooking up free food for volunteers…all just doing whatever they can. If you have the desire to help, there’s plenty to do. But no rush, they’re going to be at it for a very very long time. Wasn’t something I really thought about, but with the destruction basically just running in a long line its, at the same time, easier and harder to do. On the one hand, you can just close your eyes and point at a spot on a map, go there, and you’ll have the whole area to yourself. On the other hand, it’s hard to stage and move equipment up and down a riverbank.
Anyway, I’m mostly still numb from the whole thing but felt the need to put something in writing. Figured this was as good a place as any.