Loss isn't a first for some families

By Jennifer Brett

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A muddy slip of paper skittered down Greystone Court on Thursday in Austell, someone’s discarded lottery ticket.

It was not a winner.

On one end of the road, Jennipher Ward and daughter Cherise Banner spread dozens of soaked family photos in the sun. Next door, Doris Brown lit a cigarette as a friend stomped her ruined wooden globe stand so it would fit in the trash. Across the street, John McCawley said he thought he left flooding behind when he moved here from New Orleans, but trouble followed him east.

“I used to laugh and tell people, at least there won’t be any flooding,” he said, recalling his farewell to the Crescent City. “If you Google the location, we’re 100 feet above the creek. Why would we need flood insurance?”

Nearly half of the homes in Austell, a town of 7,000 in southwest Cobb County, were ruined or badly damaged by last week’s floods. Powder Springs, to Austell’s north, took a beating as well.

“We’re in a mess,” Brown said.

Greystone Court is a little street that tells a big story. Nearby Sweetwater Creek sloshed through every home last week, making residents here a tiny but representative part of the more than $250 million in damage the storms caused. None of the residents interviewed had flood insurance, but because Cobb was among the counties designated a federal disaster area, they’re eligible for public grants and loans to help pay for repairs.

“It’s better than taking money out of your 401(k),” said McCawley. He lives with his sister, Sharon LaNata, who moved here more than 20 years ago after being flooded in Houston. Many of their Louisiana relatives were hit by Hurricane Katrina.

Sitting outside with neighbors as everyone took a break, McCawley maintained a jaunty air.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me drinking water,” he said, taking a pull on a plastic bottle. “It’ll ruin my reputation.”

In the quiet of his ruined home, where Sheetrock and insulation have been clawed from the walls and porcelain Santa mugs peer from a cabinet at what used be the dining room, he quit cracking jokes.

“I broke down for about 10 minutes yesterday,” said McCawley, who has been staying with another sister who lives a few miles away. “I sat there feeling useless. I’ve been in construction all my life. I’ve always fixed things for other people.”

He estimates repairing the home will cost $12,000 and plans to do much of the labor himself. His sister receives retirement income, and he gets a military pension, retirement from his post-military job and will soon start drawing Social Security.

They will be all right, in other words. But not before hauling away the sodden couch and chairs, and the mountains of soggy insulation, and doing something about the pickup truck the waters swallowed.

“I don’t know where to start,” McCawley said.

Renita Long teared up as workers hauled dripping carpets from her home. Her short-term future is measured in hours of fitful sleep on a borrowed cot. And then? She’s not sure.

“This is all I could salvage,” she said, pointing to some candles wrapped in plastic. “The chairs were floating. The TV is gone.”

She has lived on Greystone Court for seven years, and is now staying at the American Red Cross shelter at the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta. She hadn’t made it to her job at a Union City temp agency since before the flood.

“Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 49,” she said. “I’ve never been through anything like this in my life.”

A worker came outside first with a pair of crutches, which she says she uses sometimes due to arthritis.

“I need those,” she said. “I’ve been in the hospital.”

Then the worker handed her a plastic bag of undamaged stuffed animals she had overlooked.

“I can’t take them. I don’t have any money to put them in storage,” she said. “I was saving those for my grandbabies. I guess just throw them away.”

They went into the trash bin, next to Brown’s warped antiques.

“The hardwood floors have buckled,” she said. “I’ve got a buffet up yonder. It was my grandmother’s. It’s ruined.”

Someone had offered her $200 recently for the globe her friend turned into kindling before trashing.

“I could have made some money,” said Brown, easing another Misty cigarette from the pack. “When I left we had water coming in the front and the back. Can you imagine water coming at you from this direction and that? I was trying to alert the neighbors as best I could. It was pouring rain and the water was gushing, darlin,’ and I’m out here like an idiot. But I was doing my best.”

Brown and her sister bought their home together in 1995, but her sister has since moved. Like McCawley, they never considered buying flood insurance.

“The homeowners [insurance] people say it won’t cover it,” she said. “My plan is to file anyway.”

She kept an eye on her Boston terrier, Dori, and Smoky the cat while waiting for her sons to come haul out more trash. Her refrigerator already sat on the curb. She has been staying with her sister and isn’t sure she will be able to move back into her home.

“The dishwasher is full of nasty water,” said Brown, who hasn’t been going inside much for fear of what could be growing in the walls. “I don’t need to be breathing that stuff.”

About lunchtime Thursday, the sun started roasting Greystone Court, an added slap to residents cleaning up without air conditioning since the power is off. But Ward and Banner, sifting through the drenched photographs, were happy for the sunshine.

Their task, peeling apart images of smiling babies, beaming homecoming queens, newlyweds and grammar school children lined up in their classrooms, was at least sort of fun.

“What’d you do to your hair that day?” Banner asked holding up a picture of her mother.

“Not very much, it looks like,” Ward said.

“Who is this?” Banner asked, waving a vintage black and white shot.

“One of my mother’s school buddies,” Ward said. “Be really careful, Cherise, especially with the older ones.”

When Ward’s parents died, she inherited a trove of photos dating back to the 1930s. She and her cousins pull them out whenever they get together. Ward’s favorite, showing her at age 5 on the way to church in a blue dress, was destroyed. But most survived, because she thought to separate the pictures while they were still wet.

“It’s working! They’re drying!” Ward said, as her family fluttered in the breeze all around her. “I’m pleased.”