Harrison RECC
More than a Memory
May 1997
After the flood,
a lesson about good neighbors
The flood of 1997
will long be more than a memory for those Kentuckians in the water’s
way this spring. Physical scars on buildings and land will last for
some time. Many say it will affect rebuilding patterns. As history,
it will be preserved in the writing and retelling of a thousand
stories. It’s not just memories that linger after the rivers
recede, but the way those memories visit our hearts and emotions,
replaying stories of sadness, courage, and in some cases, the worst
kind of human disasters.
Harrison Rural
Electric Cooperative, the consumer-owned, Cynthiana-based utility
that serves more than 11,000 consumers in eight counties in northern
Kentucky, found itself literally in the middle of all that in March.
Several electric
co-ops around the state were reminded that a flood doesn’t
necessarily affect an electric utility as much as, say, an ice storm
that can knock down poles and leave people without power. In a
flood, people ask the utility to turn off their electricity.
Instead, as
Harrison found, the best thing an electric co-op can do is what
everyone else in the community is doing--be a good neighbor. In this
case, that meant the co-op employees pitching in to help in ways
that made the most sense to each of them.
For Frankie
Taylor, Harrison’s meter specialist and radio technician, that
meant first focusing on his other role as commissioner of public
works for the city of Cynthiana. As the water rose that Saturday,
March 1, he helped move equipment from the water plant, then
returned to his Harrison duties, putting his personal cellular phone
number on the radio to take calls on electrical problems while the
phone system was out, and testing damaged meters. For Herb
Vongruenigen, Harrison member services adviser, it meant working
with local churches to buy clothes for flood victims, coordinating
the delivery of a truckload of beds from another Kentucky town, and
finding hundreds of plastic buckets for cleaning.
Harrison Interim
Manager Jack Goodman praises the work of all the co-op employees. He
says that what they did was a natural result of the involvement they
have always had with a variety of community groups.
The naturalness
of that tendency for helping neighbors made this a hard column to
write. Everyone I talked to didn’t want to talk about themselves.
They would say, “Oh, I didn’t do anything, but Larry...,” or
“You need to talk to Mitchell,” or “It was some of the
employees’ wives who went door to door to check on people.”
One of the
reactions to disasters like the 1997 flood is to try to figure out
what it all means. It’s an unanswerable question, of course, but
one of the memories we ought to allow ourselves is about how
important it is to have good neighbors.-Paul Wesslund |
