The Flood at Red Bird Mission……Chad Brock

Our week here at Red bird Mission started out Great. With some beautiful weather we were able to do several home visits where we planned gardens , done tilling and worked on building relationships with our participants.

 

Yesterday however was an entirely different story. We came to work with just cloudy sky’s and a slow drizzle rain but soon after getting here the rain picked up and the Red Bird River started to swell, in just under an hour the river had left its banks and began to fill our parking lots, gardens and yards here on campus.

I rode around campus checking to be sure our equipment was dry and in a safe place and checking our gardens.  I wanted to check two of our gardens that i knew had been planted with cole crops that were gave out at our last Grow Appalachia meeting . You could not see a single plant in them, it was all under water.  Our strawberries and our raspberries were covered in water as well, I truly was at a loss for words.

The families who were tending these gardens called and told me about the situation and were just heart broken because we all just knew that when the water went down we would see that our gardens had all been destroyed, so I told them not to worry to much we would start over and things would work out.

When I came to work this morning I was anxious to go around and see just how bad the damage was and what I was going to have to do to replace these plant.  I was amazed to see that all of our plants were not only there but standing upright and glistening in the morning sun, Yesterday they were under a foot of flood water and today they were fine. Absolutely amazing.