Written by: 4/C Andrew Leduc
Today we woke up at 0630 to get ready for a big day of work in the town of Marshall, North Carolina. The UOD (uniform of the day) was boiler suits. In the morning Mr. Burke’s mentor group was in charge of setting up breakfast. After breakfast, room 1 was responsible for cleaning up. This included vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, wiping down all the flat surfaces, and making sure breakfast was put away.
At 0800 we made our way to Marshall, NC to meet up with Rachel Bennett where she gave us our assignments for the day. My assignment along with 15 others, was to help Trish sort out her printing blocks. Trish is a local artist who’s printing blocks were destroyed in the flood. She needed our help organizing and sorting the fonts. Some other assignments were to sweep the basement of Marshall High Studios, which was full of dried up mud and dust, and cleaning the auditorium of the studios. The most challenging task about helping Trish with her letter blocks. At about 1150 we had a break for lunch, where we were allowed to go walk around town and try out some local business. My friends and I went to a highly recommended restaurant called Zadie’s. They had a couple very good options on the menu including a smash burger, and a fried chicken sandwich. At 1250 we returned from lunch and went back to our previous assignments. About 30 minutes later another cadet, 4/C Heine, and I were reassigned to go remove a brush pile with the non profit group Mountain Valley, 1/C Trout joined us to supervise. 4/C Heine and I were tasked with pulling branches out of the brush pile and loading them into a pickup truck so they could bring it to another location to burn later on in the month. At 1600 we ended the work day and went back to Camp Rockmont.
At 1800 we went into the town of Swannanoa to attend a Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance (SGA) meeting. The meeting provided real world examples of lessons we learned in Dr. Montano’s Intro to Emergency Management class last semester. There was a woman named Tisca who mentioned how recovery starts and ends locally, she also talked about how there were problems with looters and conspiracy theories. One of these theories being that FEMA took privately owned land due to minerals that had value in them. One of the community members became a member of FEMA, as a liaison, and worked with FEMA and the community until the recovery efforts were done. Overall it was an enjoyable day out in Western North Carolina helping communities recover.
