atlanta deployment: day 5

day 5...wow. im starting to feel it. my cupcake chucks arent working out so hot anymore with no arch support to be running around town so i headed to the mall and marshall's after work on search for comfortable shoes...
ended up with some awesome saucony's for $29.99 woot! my feet will thank me tomorrow im sure.
today i went out to austell again.
i swear i will know the whole town by the time i leave.
today i went to gather partnership and client stories on video and photo with kate the other pa gal.
she has been working in the office non-stop so im glad she could wander town with me today.
we visited with two sweet sister in laws today about how they lost everything and how they are rebuilding.
i also pitched a bunch of tech editors (at cnn, ny times, cnet and usa today) about our cool 'going green' handheld story...but had no bites.
i will not give up cnn!! call me!!

here is some of the video we shot today (more to come)


here is the story i did today to go with it:

Danelle’s Disaster Diaries: Picking up the soggy pieces

Martha Mask of Austell, GA may not have much, but she has her family. After five and a half feet of water raged through her home last week, Martha and her husband were lucky to get out alive with some clothes and their medications. They would later return, after flood waters receded, to find that everything they had owned was now destroyed. What she would also find is just how important family is. Not only after you have lost everything, but when you have a lot of soggy memories to clean up.

“It’s been hard, but we are surviving.” said Beatrice Bowles, Martha’s sister-in-law. Beatrice has been coming over everyday to help her brother and his wife, Martha, with the long clean up process. Her brother is legally blind and Martha has diabetes, so it is important to have people they can count on to help out when they really needed it

In just a few days they had all of the soaking wet belongings that once filled their house stacked like mountains by the side of the road. A few days later they had family and volunteers help them strip out the drywalls, floors and other rotting pieces to leave the barebones of what once was their home.

“It’s been hard, but we’re surviving,” says Beatrice. “There are a lot of people in worse shape then we are right now.” Most of Martha’s neighbor’s homes are a complete loss after the Sweetwater Creek, that is normally three feet deep, rose to heights of 30 feet last week.

“We just want to thank everyone who has come out to help us, we just hope that people will continue to support the Red Cross and all of these organizations that have come and helped us. So many people don’t realize all of the good that people do or the in-depth help you can get. Thanks to them we are as far as we are today.”

Martha and her family are just one of more than 1,200 families the Red Cross anticipates will need help as a result of this flooding. Preliminary data shows that 2, 803 homes in Georgia have been affected by the floods; 745 of which are destroyed, 760 have major damage.

“I’ve been loosing a lot of sleep, but tonight I think I’ll get a goodnights rest, cause I know everything is coming together now,” Martha added with smile.