On duty

His story.

I heard my wife scream. Her voice was muffled by the wind and then the line went dead.

I had stepped back into my bedroom in the fire house to take her call.

I sat for a second with the phone in my hand calling her name into the receiver.

I told my chief that my wife had called and needed help. He just nodded.

I ran into the parking lot and jumped into a truck.

The wind and rain made it impossible to see. The wind rocking the truck was going to make it hard to drive. Nearly impossible.

What if I left to find her and something happened to me? What if she was fine and I got hurt? Or died?

I got out of the truck and fought my way back through the storm into the fire house.

I sat and waited.

There was a low hum of voices but everyone was somber. The gravity of how bad it was kept all of our attention.

It was the longest four hours of my life.

My shift had started that morning. We normally have five firefighters on duty. That day we had 15 firefighters plus 15 police officers waiting out the storm with us. There were a couple of us who had families at home. We all sat and prayed.

My family never considered evacuating. We have lived our entire lives in North Florida. We rode out many category 2 and 3 hurricanes and this didn’t seem like it would be any different. We bought supplies, boarded up our windows and prepared for what we thought would be the worst outcome: no electricity.

After the storm passed and it was safe, I grabbed a chain saw, rescue rope and drove to our house. I dodged trees and downed power lines going 60 miles per hour to get to them.

Our street was blocked. I threw my truck into park and began running the half mile or so to our home. I couldn’t run on the street because of the debris so I ran in the ditch. The water was up to my knees and it filled up my boots. I had to stop and let the water pour out just so I could keep running.

The houses I passed on our street were intact.

Then, our house came into view.  The roof was gone. They were dead. I knew it, but I kept running.

I flung open the door to our home. The ceilings had fallen in. There was a mattress in the hallway and on it sat a cat.

I ran out of the house and back out into the street.

And then I saw her. The woman I have been madly in love with for the last 19 years and who I have known my entire life.

She was alive.

So was our son and our friend that had been with them.

I wouldn’t have cared if our entire house had fallen into a sink hole. They were safe and nothing else mattered.

I will never forget that moment. If you could bottle up that feeling it would be priceless.

I hugged them. I told her that I thought that I had killed them because I didn’t make them evacuate.

I thought it was all my fault.

Her story.

I screamed through the phone “Our roof is coming off!”

Then the cell service dropped.

The electricity had been off for a while. Since the windows were boarded up it was completely dark. A large tree fell beside our house clipping the end of the roof.  It began peeling off while we were in the hallway sitting under a mattress.

We could see bright light coming in under the closed bedroom doors. The wind was blowing violently shaking all the doors and windows. The ceiling in the dining room and in the bedrooms fell in so we had a clear view of the sky for the next four hours.

Still clinging to the mattress.

Sitting in several inches of water.

Honestly, I had doubts that we would make it out alive. We stayed calm and prayed a lot. 

We had gotten up that morning at 5 a.m. and checked the weather. I immediately knew something was wrong because the weather man was broadcasting live. He looked like he was going to vomit at any moment. Obviously, things had grown significantly worse overnight. They said ‘if you haven’t left at this point, stay put and hunker down.’ So, we did. My husband went on to work while I stayed home with our 15-year-old son and my friend who lives in an apartment by herself.

Around 4 p.m. the wind started to calm down. We heard voices and a dog barking outside. I made my way through the house and over to our neighbor’s house. Then through their window I could see my husband, still in his firefighter bunker gear racing up the street. I ran out of our neighbors’ front door with my son and friend behind me. I hugged him hard. I hadn’t cried through the entire ordeal and now it all came out. So many tears. I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life. It was absolutely the happiest moment. This whole situation was worse for him. There was no cell service so we couldn’t get in touch with him.  He didn’t know if we were alive or not.

We bought a camper to live in while we rebuild. We enjoy every single day that we have been blessed with.

We had an amazing group of New York City Fire Department volunteers from a non-profit organization called Heart 9/11 come help us completely gut our house.

People continue to say, “I’m so sorry about your house.”

“Don’t be, sorry because I’m not. I’m just happy to be alive and have my family and friends safe”. 

When you peel away all the material things and only have each other left you realize that’s all that ever really mattered to begin with.

We will watch the next hurricane that comes on a television from a hotel room far, far away.