Hard Labor at Corps of Engineers, Granger Lake, TX

 

My apologies to those that prefer an easy time line to follow.  My habit of writing about things in arrears with sometimes lengthy breaks between posts makes things a little harder.  Doing things in arrears is by design for personal safety reasons but the breaks are for a variety of reasons, some in my control, some not.

So to recap:

Depart Georgia for Texas, October 2022 

Family and Civic duty at home base, Oct/Nov 2022

Thanksgiving in North Texas, Nov 2022

Major repairs in Central Kansas, December 2022

Mad dash to beat Polar Bomb descending on Kansas, December 2022

The above are five of the nine posts that make up our return to travel volunteering post COVID.  The posting prior to this one was our rush to get out of the central part of the country that was about to experience a wicked winter storm.  We made it but with less that 36 hours to spare.  The final dash south to our current location in central Texas was uneventful.

We arrived Granger Lake's volunteer village just before sunset and were greeted by several of the volunteers that helped us select a site that we would fit in and get settled before it got dark.  It was a sign of good things to come in regards to the people we are going to be working with.

We have a very pleasant back-in site with a picnic shelter.
Things will be great until the trees leaf out.  Our satellite dish is pointed
straight through those currently bare branches.

Our site, looking in the direction of the lake.  

Our driveway is not large enough to accommodate all 
of our equipment so Chief gets a spot all to itself  across the street.

Some of our neighbors that are year 'round have covered 
campsites to shield them from the brutal summer sun.

Arriving Christmas week made it a little rough in terms of us getting in the work groove.  Between holidays and people taking vacation to maximize the holiday, we drifted some until just after New Years.  But once that was done the drifting was over!  It has been long hard days ever since.

We did get in a couple days of hard labor during the holiday though.  On Dec. 27 we reported for our first day of assignments and discovered that the park had experienced a rare hard freeze in the days prior to our arrival.  One campground was hit particularly hard and we were dispatched, along with everybody else, to repair all the burst water lines.

There were 12 of us scattered all over, digging up and 
fixing burst water lines.

There is a 'however' though in regards to us getting into the work groove.  With just an hour before arriving (Nov 28th) at the factory where our rig was built in Junction City, KS we got a phone call that my mother (just turned 89) had been taken to the emergency room.  There were difficulties in understanding exactly what her illness was and that she was being life-flighted from the little podunk town she lived in to a hospital in Midland, TX., 300 miles south where the nearest ICU bed was available.  Once there they decided on treatment for pneumonia and a mild heart attack.

After a couple weeks of testing and treatment Mom had recovered well enough to be sent home to a rehab center.  Things were looking up and we were altering our travel plans to swing by and see her on our way to Granger.  But, in less than 48 hours she was ambulanced 175 miles south to Lubbock, back to ICU.  During the time she was in Lubbock we moved from Junction City, KS to Granger, TX.  After another two weeks of testing and treatments in Lubbock she once again improved and was sent to a rehab center in Amarillo, TX.  That lasted less than 24 hours and she was back in ICU, this time in Amarillo.  This whole time Mom's husband was by her side, sleeping on cots, recliners and the front seat of his truck.  But the day came that the phone call we got was not an update about her progress, rather, her passing.  January 12, 2023.

In the next two weeks after that phone call we made two round trips (nine hours one way), first to help with arrangements and then attend the celebration of life.  Our last return trip was during a brutal ice storm that stopped us cold in Abilene for a couple of unplanned nights in a hotel. 

Although our departure from Borger started out cold, at least it was dry.
That was not the case the closer we got to Abilene.  Ice started 
accumulating more rapidly with each mile.

We were picking up lots of ice and the heater could not keep up 
with clearing our view.

Ice had coated everything by the time we got to Abilene.
The headlights were of little use and the forward collision 
avoidance system had shut down.

Everything in Abilene was shut down save a Circle K that was just a short walk across the parking lot from the hotel.  We lived off a couple packages of expired hotdogs and a loaf of bread for those two days.

When we finally did make it back to our rig things were a mess.  The ice had been extreme across a large swath of central Texas.  There was not a tree without broken limbs and a power line left unbroken.  At the time of our arrival the power had already been out 36 hours and it stayed that way for another 3 days for us.  For some people in nearby Austin they were without power for another two weeks.

Utility crews arrived by the hundreds from far and wide.  Hundreds of power poles and miles of transmission lines were replaced.  The nearby town of Taylor, where we do our shopping and access most other services, was completely dark.  No traffic signals, no lights, and most importantly for the H-E-B and Walmart Supercenter, no refrigeration.  Both lost their entire inventory of frozen and refrigerated food.

I was in Walmart within hours of the power coming back on and below is what I saw.  No dairy, no meats, and the freezers were taped off.  That's okay, we don't buy that stuff anyway.  However we do buy fresh vegetables and those cases were empty also.

Boy are we glad we bit the bullet a couple of years ago and got a portable generator.  We had resisted getting one for years because of cost, space and weight issues but the need finally outweighed reluctance.  And this time the generator did more than just make it possible to keep extras like TV and the microwave going.  This time the power outage lasted so long that our batteries would not have made it through operating the controller boards on things like our refrigerator and furnaces.  They may run on propane but they both have electronic controllers and thermostats that need electricity.  Thanks to the generator and 2.5 gallons of no-ethanol fuel a day we stayed warm and fed for the duration of the power outage.  And internet too.  Since adding Starlink our ability to communicate has been greatly improved and in this weather emergency it really shined.  With the generator supplying plenty of power to the 120V router we were able to use our phones via VoIP (voice over internet protocol) despite all the cell towers being dead as a hammer.

Once the power came back on work was started in earnest.  Damage assessment was done and found to be extensive in regards to trees.  Within the park's campgrounds, boat ramps and day use areas there was in excess of a thousand trees with limbs stripped off of them and piled around the trunk.  Many so damaged that the whole tree will have to come down.

The two photos below is a tiny sampling of tree damage in the developed areas of Granger Lake.  These trees are specifically in the Volunteer Village where we have camp set up.

The above scene was repeated over and over all around the lake and it became abundantly clear that it was going to be a huge cleanup job.  Tons of manual labor coupled with mechanization, chainsaws, UTVs, tractors, dump trucks and more.

Granger Lake is a small operation, full time employees total 5.  They are totally self-sufficient, if anything gets done it is by one of the five or a volunteer.  There is no maintenance department, no recreation group, no land management group, just the five that wear whatever hat is needed on any given day.  The one and only contract they have is for mowing and that's a bigee.  But there are still large swaths that are not covered by the contract and the volunteers take care of that.

The live-in-park volunteer gig requires each campsite to complete 20 hours a week of work.  We learned immediately upon arrival that the volunteers at this operation have arranged to get their hours in on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  Once we got going with the flow we discovered that those were eight hour days and everybody usually did a little something on the side on their "days off".  Twenty hours a week was easy to come by.  Many of the volunteers talked about doing 200+ hours a month during recreation season.  We're talking 50 hours a week.  That's a full time job with overtime.  Cyndee and I will be moved on to our next gig in Utah before that time comes.  Thank goodness!

Peak recreation season may not have started but we certainly have plenty to do.  Between the storm damage cleanup and scheduled jobs there is more than enough to keep a large crew engaged.

We started off with being put on the refurbishment of multiple public bathrooms and bathhouses around the lake.  We joined an existing crew (of two) and got to work on stripping Luan board off walls and bead board from ceilings.  Then the tedious work of scraping, scraping, scraping.

Scraping decades old Liquid Nails was no fun.

 

After 16 hours of four people scraping non-stop, we 
finally got to the priming then painting part.
Given my height I was given all the trim work between six 
and eight feet.

When it was all said and done, we completely refurbished three bathrooms/bath houses.  The couple we worked with had already done three by themselves before we arrived.  Oooff!

The scraping and painting wasn't an all-or-nothing thing.  We alternated a couple of times between that and ice damage cleanup.  We were definitely the manual labor part I mentioned earlier.  Our job was to drag up, by hand, broken branches and stack them where a tractor with a grabber could pick them up and put them in a dump truck for transportation to our burn pile area.  That meant we had to get clear of the trees they came off of, out from under power lines, not on asphalt, and with a clear path the tractor can drive on.  There was a lot of dragging to find a spot that met all those requirement.

Safety meeting to kick off the cleanup of ice damage.
There are going to be chainsaws and heavy machinery around people on foot.
That's Cyndee and I on the far right.

I stopped when the photographer asked.  My work buddy didn't.
I think he popped hemorrhoid 

Cyndee dragging branches up to a pile.

After several hours of limb dragging these two nearly 70-year-olds 
had to take a breather.  That's me on the right.

I never have paid much attention to it but my phone, like most everybody else I suppose, has a step counter.  One of the other volunteers keeps up with their steps and announced one afternoon what I thought was a ridiculous number.  I had been working the same area as this person all day and had made as many trips as anybody so I thought I would look at my step counter.  Wow!  I knew we were working a large campground but had no idea of the coverage I had done.  My total for the day was 9.01 miles!  Exactly the same as the other person.  And half of those miles were done while dragging a heavy load.

At the time of this writing we have drug up about half of the tree branches.  I added up all the distance my pedometer recorded and came up with 44.42 miles.  My legs are starting to look like they did when I was skating and playing hockey and my core has tightened up a bit.  Nobody is going to say "look at those guns" upon seeing my arms but they are of a size and tone I have not had in a long, long, time.  Of course to go along with all this gain there was/is plenty of pain.  We've both been tossing back acetaminophen at the maximum rate.