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The taproom was a bit fuller than normal on a recent Monday night at 12 Fox Beer Co. In addition to the usual veterans in attendance for the Fireside Chat Support Network, there were a number of new members and guests. And on this night, once everyone had finished dinner and the meeting began, talk turned to support of another kind - for the Hill Country communities recovering from the July floods.
It’s been over a month now since the deadly weather event, which dumped between 5 and 11 inches of rain over a broad area in a matter of hours. The death toll currently stands at 135 confirmed fatalities, with 116 of those along the Upper Guadalupe in Kerr County.
“Let’s get the word out. We’re not gonna stop,” Joe Hogge, who owns 12 Fox with his wife Stacey, told the assembled group. “We’ve got a good base of people and we just need to keep bringing in new ones and spreading the word. Even though a lot of people in this town know about us, there’s still people that don’t.”
The nonprofit Fireside Chat veterans group has been focused on flood recovery in two ways - through shipments of supplies, and through hands-on work in the affected areas. Members have been volunteering with chainsaws and heavy machinery to clear the river and the surrounding land of debris.
“I don’t wanna give up on going downrange and helping with this stuff because it’s gonna take months to recover,” Hogge said during the meeting. “For the next few weeks, our main focus is making sure that we can get a move out every weekend to a specific place with a task list, with the stuff they need to get the job done. Right? So that we’re not counting on other people to come and tell us what to do or supply us with whatever we need before we go do the job.”
Dusty Drake, owner of Dynamo Dusty’s Tree Service, has been taking his chainsaw crew to Kerr County on weekends. And Judge John Burns, Justice of the Peace for Precinct 4, has been coordinating crews in Leander’s Sandy Creek. They say both areas are still in need of lots of help, including volunteers with heavy machinery like skid steers.
“I had people that I never met before come work for a couple hours or a whole day and thank me afterwards for organizing this and leading this effort,” Burns said. “I think there are people who need someplace to go and they want to help. They just don’t know what to do or where to go.”
That’s where Fireside Chat comes in. They are coordinating directly with people in the affected areas, so that they know exactly where help is needed.
“There’s just so much devastation everywhere. You can’t imagine. Words like devastation and destruction don’t describe what we saw,” Burns said. “My concern is that once it stops being on the news and people stop thinking about it… we’re not going to have people to volunteer. But we’ll get across that bridge when we get there.”
Burns said the Sandy Creek crews are working long days up there, but even if people can only volunteer for a half a day, it’s impactful.
“It doesn’t have to be a weekend, if they’re willing. Sandy Creek is an hour and 10 minutes from here,” Burns said. “You can easily drive up, work for four or five hours and drive home.”
He emphasized that it’s not easy work - it’s hot and humid along the riverbank, with gnats and mosquitos to contend with. But there are other jobs besides hauling wood for those who aren’t physically up to the challenge. The group also has current wishlists on Amazon and Home Depot, or people can donate directly to Fireside Chat Support Network.
“We’re a 501c3, so it’s a tax deductible donation, and we’ll find a way to do the best we can to meet people’s needs,” Burns said. “And none of us get paid. We are all absolutely volunteer.”
That includes the crews from Dynamo Dusty’s Tree Service. One of the things his company does is mentor young men, so when the disaster hit, he asked some of them if they would be willing to go help.
“Six or seven of us went down there and we went to Center Point and asked what we could do,” Drake said. “And so the first part of the day we did recovery efforts, looking for bodies and stuff like that along the river.”
Later that day, they ended up at Camp CAMP (Children’s Association for Maximum Potential), which serves individuals with special needs.
“We cut up a lot of wood and helped get the river open down there,” Drake said.
Next they went to Hunt. When the fire chief heard that they were an experienced chainsaw crew, he sent them to work with another crew from Cherry Creek landscaping.
“And so we got put on some large projects down there, just clearing a pretty large field, about 40 acres along the river that really hadn’t been searched yet,” Drake said. “Somehow we ended up running the site and had like 40 or 60 people working with us over the last couple of weekends.”
He said the land owners were overwhelmed and grateful for the help.
“But we couldn’t do that without 12 Fox doing what they do knowing where to go and then sending supplies down there,” Drake said.
Drake said it was very rewarding to have people show up and within five minutes be working together.
“There was no ‘what do you do for a living,’ no divisiveness. It was just really a lot of unity and people that care for people.”
He said it has been impressive to see how a community can come together.
“Seeing the young guys that we work with - they were up at 5 in the morning to get on the road, they were super motivated to get down there and help that was really cool, just seeing how much they wanted to volunteer,” Drake said.
He said recovery is going to be a long effort.
“Your phone doesn’t capture it. When you see the scale of the devastation, it’s kind of a feeling of helplessness,” Drake said. “There were 200-year-old trees that were 100 feet tall, cypresses, that were turned over. It’s a massive amount of destruction that happened in a really short period of time. It shocked me. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He reiterated that though this will fade out of the spotlight, volunteers are still needed.
“If you’re looking to help, check social media. Facebook seems to be a pretty good way to find places to go and volunteer,” Drake said. “Or reach out to the 12 Fox support community that they have here, because now they’ve got an infrastructure set up here where they’re tracking all that information.”
For Joe and Stacey Hogge, there’s also a personal connection to Kerr County.
“This is our backyard. Stacey’s from Kerrville. She went to high school in Kerrville, but she grew up in Center Point, Comfort as a little kid, lived right downtown in those little bitty towns,” Joe Hogge said. “So that’s home. When we were dating, when I went to visit, I always went to Kerrville.”
They still have a lot of family in Kerr County, so when the news hit, they were immediately calling to check on everyone.
“I just know that area. I’ve seen the floods myself,” Stacey Hogge said. “My dad is a retired fire chief of Kerrville. He was in the force for 37 years. He says the first flood he remembers was the flood of ‘59. And there’s never been anything remotely like this flood.”
She said that it was important to her that the time and energy of the Fireside Chat volunteers, and the community’s donations, were going directly to the places that needed it most. So she leveraged her family ties to get connected to the local leaders and get upto date information. Moving forward, she thinks the Fireside Chat efforts may focus more on targeted assistance for families.
“Maybe they were under insured, or nothing’s moving on their property, or they’re too old to be able to actually get out and do the work to clear their own property,” Stacey Hogge said. “We’d like to find those families and figure out how we as a crew can show up and help them specifically.”
One of the people working on that is Stephanie Read, who stepped up to help with donations during the beginning of the influx.
“Stephanie has been an amazing coordinator for logistics,” Stacey Hogge said.
Read said she felt called to help the relief efforts when she saw the volume of donations that were coming in. In just a day and a half, they had already filled the smaller building on the 12 Fox property.
“I just knew that for Joe and Stacey to take this on, which they felt very strongly they wanted to do, that I could offer my skill set and that would be my gift to them,” Read said.
She contacted a company in Austin called Musclemen Elite Moving and Storage to help get things started. They were offering free storage containers for relief groups. The company delivered as promised, and within days, that container was full. Read got on the phone and asked for another, and they came through again.
Meanwhile, Joe Hogge had been contacted by Aaron Negherbon of Troops Direct, who offered to use his contacts to get even more supplies.
“We received a very huge shipment of work gloves from Mechanix, and then pallets and pallets of Prime drinks,” Read said. “It was like running a business and having all this inventory and then trying to meet the needs of all the different locations.”
She said the response to the recovery efforts has been incredible from day one. As of August 10, they have delivered a total of 35 shipments to about 25 different locations.
“And it continues, which to me just is a testament to our community here - Dripping Springs in particular, but I have people coming from Wimberley and north of us,” Read said.
Read said that her local contacts are pleading for the group to keep going. In the affected areas, a lot of the store shelves are empty of key items due to high demand. And she said she is increasingly concerned about the mental health of people in those communities.
“The folks that have been affected, a lot of them just went into survival mode up until this particular point,” Read said. “Now that enough time has passed, people are starting to say all of a sudden it’s hitting them. It’s a lot of hurt and it’s very heavy.”
Read said she doesn’t know the answer for that, but she doesn’t want people to feel like they’ve been left alone and abandoned. If the Fireside Chat Support Network has anything to say about it, that won’t happen.
“I’m just trying to tread water and keep it going,” Joe Hogge said. “Behind the scenes we’re just kicking and pedaling, making it happen.”
