I got an email from a friend last night. He said that his friend was flooded in Texas and had lost many family mementos and valuable items.
Obviously this is a terrible thing to have to go through.
We went through it during Hurricane Sandy when the Hudson came over its banks and flooded our building’s basement and first floor.
All of our building systems were destroyed and all of the families had to vacate our building for what turned out to be almost four months.
We also lost everything in our storage unit in our basement, including many family mementos and valuable items.
We fought with the insurance companies for almost a year and recouped maybe 50 cents on the dollar.
The mementos were and are irreplaceable. Gone forever.
But as I am typing this, I must say that although it was a terrible experience for us, nobody in our family was hurt and we have fullly recovered from it
Thankfully we have the means to absorb the financial losses and I realize that many people don’t.
We should have better federal flood insurance for this reason. The federal flood insurance system doesn’t cover many things that it should and sadly many people in Texas will suffer significant financial losses that they will not be able to fully recover from their insurers.
At this time, it seems that the death toll for Harvey will be in the range of Sandy, which took 117 lives, mostly in NY and NJ.
To lose so few when so many are impacted is a testament to the outpouring of assistance that we saw in both Sandy and Harvey. There are many heroes in both of these disaster stories.
So first and foremost, we should all be thankful that so many were saved from harm. And we should seek out ways to help those who don’t have the means to sustain the financial losses they have taken. That is where I want to focus our support right now.
Floods are terrible. But once the waters recede and recovery begins, many will recover quickly, as we did, and move on. Some will struggle. They will need our help and hopefully we can all come together to provide that.
