There are things here at my house that will never be the same following the big floods of September 2013. So far, nothing has been better than it was before the flood, although the highway department promises a better-designed, safer, more resilient main road by the end of 2017.

Here at the house, we've fixed some things like our private access road so we can drive up to the house, and we're working on the red cabin, but so much of it is a compromise and an inconvenience and very expensive. I've read studies of disaster survivors where some of them said their living situation or some other factor in their lives was better since the flood, due to getting a new HUD home or some other government benefit, but given a choice they would have just as soon not had the disaster.

Well, anyhow. Yesterday one of my own flood recovery items got checked off. Century Link finally sent repairmen to properly install the phone line to my house. Since the flood it has been on the ground from the pole up to my house. It went along the lane, across the bridge, across the yard and up to the house. Over the past 658 days the company's representatives - from the 'help' desk in India to repairmen whom I talked to at other peoples' houses told me the company was not required to repair their phone line. It required a complaint to the state Public Utilities Commission to get some action, and even then it was frustrating, but it finally worked.



To get the new line across the river, they borrowed fishing waders and one of them flung a wrench tied to a fiberglass tape at his partner who was waiting on the riverbank next to the water. That worked out well. And the rest was their normal procedure.

Then, they needed to locate a break in the line east of me that is affecting the ability to restore service to the folks on Rainbow Trout Lane. We followed the side stream by my house for about half a mile to follow the phone line to where it heads over the mountain. It goes to a place called Grandpa's Retreat that is a distance off the highway. They lost their road in the flood and no public entity has stepped up to do the $800,000 or more repairs for them. Their problem is nobody lives there full-time. It wouldn't have guaranteed complete coverage, but would have been better than the nothing they have now. I have a feeling the phone company will come up with a solution that circumvents that property and finally gets phone service to my neighbors.



This picture is from after the 1976 flood. The sign was a landmark in the canyon, and it wasn't replaced after that flood, but the old timers like me still remember it. Before the implementation of rural 9-1-1 required the naming of our roads, we had to have landmarks like this so people could find our homes.

Looking past the sign, you can see their ruined road. It got fixed back in the 1970s, but won't this time unless the highway department decides it's a good place to get rid of some of the rock generated in blasting out cliffs during road construction. We'll see.