in which Bob and Gail get chased by tropical weather.
Gail and I knew when we joined ReachGlobal Crisis Response that we would be involved in hurricanes. We knew as we entered this (still young) hurricane season that we might be involved in several. What we didn’t know what that they were going to follow us around.
Hurricane 1: Beryl
We planned (and had) a wonderful family gathering over the 4th of July weekend (A Celebratory Chaos of Cousins). We did not plan for the weekend to end in a hurricane. The gathering was in Coldspring, TX, about an hour and a half north of Houston. During the course of the weekend we watched Hurricane Beryl forming up in the Gulf. We finally concluded that we needed to finish out our time on Sunday afternoon rather than Monday morning so that we wouldn’t have to drive through the middle of the storm on Monday. This proved to be a good call as all of us made it back to our houses before the storm hit.
Beryl came ashore as an intensifying category 1 hurricane and traversed Houston with 80 mph winds. I (Bob) have now sat under six hurricanes and tropical storms and I have to say that for a category 1 storm, the rain and wind were intense. The worst impact of the storm was the loss of power to more than 2.6 million homes in the Houston area. Some of these homes were still without power two weeks later. All of the homes that our family was staying in were without power on Monday, though some of us got it back sooner (Monday evening) and some later (Thursday or Friday).
At our house the damage was minor. We had several limbs down in our back yard and several lengths of fence totaling about 40 feet. Some folks at our church had more significant damage, including trees that fell onto and through the roofs.
One of our daughters had water driven into her house, probably through door and window caulking. This caused Gail and I to do a mini crisis response. We gutted several walls of the house to about two feet and one section to about six feet where there was some termite damage to the studs. Then we put up new vapor barrier, insulation and dry wall. Our experience working in homes with Crisis Response served us in good stead.
Here are a few pictures of Beryl
Hurricane #2: Debby
As soon as we finished helping with Beryl, we jumped into Phoebe (our camper van) and drove to Fort Myers, Florida. We enjoyed interacting with two weeks of teams and re-connecting with the men’s and women’s Bible Studies. We also worked hard on a new trauma based Bible Study to be used as the first study in a new response. We hope to have that material ready this summer.
At the end of two weeks our plan was to run up to central Florida. Gail’s brother Michael has a house in The Villages, and we planned to spend a few days there. Which we have. But we were chased up the east coast of Florida by Tropical Storm Debby, which soon became Hurricane Debby. We hunkered down in Michael’s house and had no real problems with the wind and the rain. Our friends in Fort Myers and Bonita Springs were also mostly dry, but in Fort Myers Beach the storm surge put water into many of the businesses that are just reopening from Hurricane Ian in 2022.
As I write this Debby has come ashore in South Carolina with major rains preceding it into North Carolina. There is still a potential for significant flooding in the storm’s path. We’ve been in touch with a couple of the EFCA churches in the area and so far all seems well, but we’ll continue to monitor the situation.
Here are a few pictures from Debby:
We’ll be returning to Fort Myers to help a team from Minnesota work in homeowner’s houses next week. We’ll also be working on the trauma based Bible Study. We’d appreciate prayers that that study have the right content to help people connect with God after all kinds of crises.
If you’d like to be part of our prayer team, leave a comment on this post, or email me at bob.degray@efca.org or Gail at gail.degray@efca.org.
If you’d like to support us, which would be a real blessing as we are somewhat behind in our monthly donations, just go to https://give.efca.org/missionaries/bob-gail-degray