As head of residential inspections in Fairfax County’s public works department, Paul Lynch has seen his share of swamped communities with Hurricane Isabel in 2003 and the 2006 flooding in Huntington. But nothing on the scale of what he saw in Louisiana, where he just returned from a two-week foray aiding recovery in Hurricane Ike-struck Cameron Parish.
Talk about the community you saw when you got down there.
I was one of a team of seven of us, the other members were from Roanoke, we were back-filling an emergency operations center in Cameron Parish … It is one big wetland, for the most part. The population is 7,000, it was 10,000 when [Hurricane] Rita hit three years ago right after [Hurricane] Katrina. Three years after Rita, Ike hit, and basically undid all the recovery after Rita.
How badly were homes damaged?
The people that moved back from Hurricane Rita moved back in mobile homes, and many of them set the homes back on the same support that their houses had been on and got washed away, literally washed away into the swamp. And in this case, the same type of thing happened. … The people that built above the flood elevation survived pretty much unscathed. It was very telling, there were buildings within 20 feet of each other, one was fully occupied and back in business and the other was totally destroyed.
How did you get called down there?
What happens is there is a network in the country where a jurisdiction gets overwhelmed and they put a call out to their state emergency operation center, and they send out a request nationally. … The Virginia Department of Emergency Management put out a call, and we as a community tried to fill those slots. Roanoke couldn’t fill all the slots, and at the last minute I was made aware of the opportunity, and literally within 24 hours of seeing the e-mail I was boarding the plane at Dulles.
Describe your role down there.
We were pretty much in a support role, just assisting the emergency manager of the community. … We’re there to help them do things the way they wanted it done, and when the need arises, the emergency support center is literally the grease that makes the machine run.
