Still blessed amid disasters
Iolans rebound from multiple disasters

By RICHARD LUKEN
Register Reporter

Register/Richard Luken Carolyn McLean will show off this room and several others in her house Saturday as part of the Allen County Animal Rescue Facility’s annual Holiday Homes Tour. The home has undergone major repairs since the June 2007 flood. The tours are from 3 to 6 p.m.

It’s been more than 16 months since Val and Carolyn McLean experienced firsthand — not once or twice, but three times — the worst Mother Nature could muster.
“We were starting to feel cursed,” Val said. “We’d warn our friends not to stand too close to us.”
Things have settled down a bit, although their recovery from the June 2007 flood that hit south Iola still is not complete.
The McLean home at 702 S. First St., is one of seven being featured from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday as part of the Allen County Animal Rescue Facility’s annual Holiday Homes Tour. Each of the homes has been restored or built anew because of the flood.
Crews will tear out their old furnace on Monday — “We told them to wait until after Saturday’s tour,” Carolyn said — and a few exterior projects may extend past that.
Carolyn pointed to a fireplace in their new living room. The gas-powered unit, which was in about 41⁄2 feet of water, quit working last week, “which is what they told us would happen,” she said.
The heating units carry a bit of significance. They are the last major items exposed to the floodwater that the McLeans will have to replace.

IN A MORBID twist of fate, Val and Carolyn McLean are among the few — if not the only — people in the nation affected by Hurricane Katrina, the Greensburg tornado and then the Iola flood.
The homes of Carolyn’s mother and sister in Gulfport, Miss., were essentially wiped from their foundations in the August 2005 hurricane.
Carolyn’s mother, Joy Knipple, lived about 200 yards from the Gulf of Mexico before the storm, Val said. “Now she has ocean-front property.”
Knipple stayed with the McLeans for a while after Katrina, returning to Gulfport to live in a trailer supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency until her home was rebuilt. She moved back home within a month before the 2007 flood hit Iola. Carolyn’s sister opted not to rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.
The lessons from the hurricane provided the McLeans at least a glimpse of what they might be saddled with if their home were to flood, Carolyn said.
They were on hand when her mother was told that her insurance did not cover flood damage.
“The first thing we did when we got back to town was to ask John McRae if we had enough flood insurance for personal property,” Carolyn said. When informed while their home was insured, they had no such coverage for personal proeprty.
The McLeans immediately purchased a new policy for both.
The moves proved to be invaluable. The McLeans were one of only a handful of residents with insurance that covered personal property losses in the Allen County flooding.
And while the coverage did not pay for all of the expenses they incurred from the disaster, “we understand that a lot of people wound up in a lot worse shape than we were,” Carolyn said. “We felt blessed in a way.”

THE GREENSBURG storm was just a minor part of a tumultuous week for Val.
Bill McLean, Val’s father, had died days earlier, and funeral services were scheduled for May 5, 2007, in Lewis, about 10 miles to the north of Greensburg.
Val recalled arriving at his parents’ house in Lewis, expecting to see a building crammed with loved ones.
“When we arrived, we didn’t see a soul,” Val said.
Everyone was huddled in the basement because of the storms.
“They started screaming when I opened the basement door,” Val recalled. “They thought it was the tornado.”
“We had to seek shelter three other times that weekend,” Val continued, “and none of those was the one that hit Greensburg. We even saw two other tornadoes.”
The Greensburg storm cut power to communities for miles around, including Lewis. The funeral service the next day was conducted under candlelight.
It wasn’t until after the funeral that the McLeans learned of the devastation in Greensburg. Because of the timing, they happened to be among the first private residents to directly give aid to the tornado victims. They donated all of Bill McLean’s old clothing, as well as an assortment of frozen and nonperishable food to the community.

ALLEN COUNTIANS recall the weekend of May 4, 2007, for another reason. It was in the midst of an unusually wet and rainy spring.
Torrential downpours that weekend turned the normally lazy current of Elm Creek into a full broil.
Because they were still out of town, a number of baseball players and assistant coaches at Allen County Community College — where Val is the long-time head coach — volunteered to move some of the McLeans’ furniture to higher ground in case flooding were to worsen.
They also decided to test the creek’s current with the McLeans’ 14-foot, V-bottomed boat.
The swift current quickly overcame the novice boaters. The boat capsized and prompted a highly publicized water rescue of one of the coaches who became hung up in a tree while swimming to shore south of Iola.
“We were getting back into Iola from the funeral when we saw the police car at the house,” Val said. “That’s when one of the coaches told me he had some good news — nobody had died — but some bad news as well. They lost my boat.”
The boat was never recovered.

AS SPRING turned to summer, Val and Carolyn headed to Mississippi to help Carolyn’s mother return to her refurbished home, an effort that kept them in the region until late June.
The days of constant and increasingly voluminous rain that preceded the Iola flooding were just beginning when they returned to Kansas.
“We weren’t even home a few days when we became refugees,” Carolyn said.
The night before the flood, Val sensed trouble.
He moved his pickup, lawn mower and a few other items from his garage to higher ground. He also decided to sleep in the home’s family room, on the lowest level and at the rear of the house, to monitor the water level from Elm Creek.
“The lowest level of the house is supposed to be a foot above flood stage,” Val said, “but we knew it was looking bad.”
He set an alarm clock to awaken him each hour. By 3:30 a.m. on the 30th he thought he was in the clear.
“You could see that the water level just wasn’t rising very quickly,” he recalled.
But the rain started again, falling seemingly harder and harder by the minute.
By 5:30, the water level was rising rapidly and they moved to higher ground.
“I woke up Carolyn and she started getting pictures and a few things she wanted to save,” he recalled. “I told her, ‘You don’t understand. We need to get out now.’ The water was rising that fast.”
Leaving was an ordeal in itself. The rains filled clogged drainage ditches throughout town to the point that all of the roads were under water.
“It was almost like trying to drive off an island,” Carolyn said.
The water was to the floor board of Val’s pickup, and moving swiftly.
They sought refuge at the house of Kelly Keeton, Carolyn’s daughter.
It wasn’t until they looked through binoculars from a distance to see water inside their family room window that they realized how high the water had reached.
The water was 51⁄2 inches off the floor in the middle level, and 41⁄2 feet above the floor in the family room.
Val used a neighbor’s boat to gain access the afternoon of the flood to grab some pictures and other keepsakes, as well as a vacuum.
A vacuum?
“We’d been trying to sell a house on North Jefferson Street,” Val explained. “Luckily for us, it just hadn’t sold. We knew that we could live in it if we needed to. And I knew Carolyn would want to make sure the floors were clean.”

VAL AND CAROLYN knew that most anything that came in contact with the floodwater was ruined, particularly cloth. Still, efforts were made to save what they could.
A cabinet filled with pictures was partially submerged, although others were on shelves just above the water’s edge.
One of the more remarkable sights from the flood came from nightcrawlers deposited in the home’s living area. The worms gave the appearance of another carpet in the room.
“There were thousands of them,” Val said. “You couldn’t take a step without stepping on probably 100 of ’em.”
The recovery became a test of endurance. It took a month by itself to handle the cleanup.
From sunup to sundown, day after day in the baking heat, Val and Carolyn worked side by side, pausing long enough to trudge up to the tent opened by the Red Cross on South State Street to serve meals to flood relief workers.
“We were dirty, wet, tired,” Val said. “We looked like bums, but we weren’t going to take the time to clean ourselves.”
All of the carpeting was ripped out. Then came the soggy furniture and deluged appliances. A handful of pictures, paintings and other valued prints had been propped against the walls days earlier in order to be hung, Carolyn said.
Instead, they had to be tossed in the trash.
The McLeans accumulated enough debris to fill two semi trailer-sized dumpsters.
The volunteer center stationed at The One in downtown Iola also was a frequent stopping point so they could pick up cleaning supplies.
“I don’t even want to guess how much bleach we went through,” Carolyn said.
Even with the damage, the McLeans figured that the walls in the home’s second level could be preserved.
“They didn’t look bad, and we tried to dry them out the best we could,” Val said.
But a visiting inspector showed the couple how much work remained by drilling random holes in the previously submerged Sheetrock.
“As soon as he did that, water started pouring out of the hole,” Val said. “That’s when we knew we were screwed.”
They immediately began cutting away the bottom 4 feet of the second level drywall.

THE MCLEANS opted for a logical approach to the repairs. Formerly carpeted floors were replaced by tile atop a water-resistant masonite base.
“If it floods again, we can just hose it off,” Carolyn said.
Likewise, outlets in the lower levels of the house were elevated to above where the floodwater reached.
The biggest changes came when they decided to relocate the living room.
“We didn’t really want to keep the family in the lower level in case it flooded again,” said Carolyn, who specializes in interior design.
Instead, they removed a wall to a bedroom, creating a spacious living area in the front of the house. The lower level has become Val’s “sportsmen’s refuge.”
“That’s where I watched the World Series,” Val said.
“The whole thing was miserable,” he continued, “but I’m sure there’s just a little part of Carolyn who liked getting to do some designing.”
About a month into the venture, the couple realized the work was too arduous to do alone.
Fall classes were about to resume at ACCC, which meant Val would be called away. He did so reluctantly, although “going to work was like a vacation,” he said.
They received help from local contractors Ed Catron and Kelly Daylong, who already had been hired to work elsewhere.
“They came by when they had time from their other jobs,” Carolyn said.
In addition, a group of volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints volunteered one day.
The biggest hand came from former Iolan Peter Heppler, who traveled in from Ottawa to help with the recovery.
“He was our angel,” Carolyn said. “And he didn’t just help us. We was at several places to help that summer.”

BY JANUARY, the McLeans were back at home, amid the ongoing repairs. By then, replacing furniture and other effects had slowed to a crawl.
“Finances played a part in the end,” Val said.
The McLeans, who also founded the nearby Elm Creek Community Garden, noted they’d like to get back around to doing some garden work in 2009 and beyond. They couldn’t this year.
“We had to prioritize things,” Val said.
“We know a lot more about recovering from a disaster than we ever thought we would have,” Val said. “One of the bad things was trying to get accurate information. We’d hear one statement from one FEMA representative, then something completely opposite from somebody else.
“Before, we were rookies,” he continued. “Now we know what to do.”
Still, memories of the struggle remain vivid, Carolyn said.
“Knowing what we know now,” she said, “I don’t think I could go through this again.”