KERR COUNTY, Texas – Mark Cobin has seen disaster before, but not like this.
“We’ve done hurricanes in Louisiana. We’ve done floods in Florida,” he said. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
The flooding in the Hill Country is the fourth disaster Cobin has responded to as a volunteer with the Churches of Christ Disaster Response Team, based out of Tipp City, Ohio.
Cobin himself calls Canyon Lake home, about 50 miles down the same river that caused so much devastation on July 4.
“We do what we can to demo it and then we’ll do what we can to rebuild,” Cobin said, standing on the still-soggy dirt under the floorboards he ripped out of a home.
“You see the water line up on the wall there? We try and go at least a couple feet above,” he said, referring to walls he’d already ripped out. “But in this case, because it’s so high, we’ve gone to the ceiling.”
As a retired Air Force Officer, Cobin doesn’t have professional experience in ripping out floors, walls and sheetrock.
“You learn,” he said.
Gutting homes and rebuilding is the hard part.
Learning about the people behind the project is the best part, he said, like Johnny McAshan, the owner of Bumblebee Lodge along Highway 39 between Ingram and Hunt.
The home — rented out to help pay the bills and serve as a family getaway for nearly 80 years — took on more than five feet of water in the flood.
“The foundation of this place is art,” McAshan said. “Art is the foundation.”
McAshan’s grandmother founded the Hill Country Arts Foundation, which was also damaged in the flood.
“My grandparents are gone. My parents are gone. My brother and my sister-in-law are gone,” McAshan said. “So it’s just down to me and our sister and our kids and our grandkids that are gonna try to keep this place alive.”
Now, that effort also includes people like Cobin and volunteers from around the country who are working to demolish, dry out and rebuild parts of the lodge.
While the home was soaked in the flood, there are parts McAshan desperately hopes his helpers can save, like the wood walls of a bathroom hand-painted by his grandmother, his mother and McAshan himself.
“To most people, like Johnny, it’s more than boards and nails,” Cobin said.
“It’s memories. This is part of his mom right here,” he said, standing in the bathroom painted sunset yellow with clouds, trees and the hills that are a signature in this part of Texas.
“We’ll work around whatever we can,” Cobin said.
When disaster strikes, the Churches of Christ DRT sets up a base camp, so to speak, at a local Church of Christ location.
This time, that’s the Riverside Church of Christ in Kerrville, which has also transformed into a supply center for flood victims.
>> From Bible study to boots & bleach: Kerrville church transforms into supply center after July flood
“We’ve talked to somebody from Maine. We’ve had somebody from West Virginia,” said Cobin, who was working in the home alongside a couple from Missouri.
That volunteer from Maine is Joanie Russell, who is cooking meals back at the church to keep volunteer crews fed.
“Disaster takes me everywhere,” Russell said, as she made a meal of sweet and sour cabbage.
“However long that they need me, through the rebuild, through the rip out, through whatever, I’m here,” she said.
Volunteers are sleeping in trailers in the church parking lot or in Sunday school classrooms with towels draped over the windows to block out light while they rest.
Cobin said the team will stay as long as they can, doing as much as they can, with the donations that make it possible, all of it at no cost to homeowners.
He knows he won’t leave Bumblebee Lodge complete, estimating it’s likely a year-long project to restore the home.
Cobin likes McAshan’s idea for the future: to hang a picture frame over the water line, some 5 feet up on the walls, to preserve it.
“He plans on hanging this picture up here and put the date on it so it reminds him of the flood on July 4th,” Cobin said. “Sounds like a good plan to us.”