May 14, 2010: On a cool Friday night in Nashville, Hope Force staffers Chuck and Sue Duby enjoyed a barbeque on the back of their lovely home. By Sunday night, their rain gauge topped out at over 15 inches following a 36-hour downpour!  “Since then, life has taken on a new perspective,” they said. “We're actually living in the middle of one of those disasters that we've trained for all these months and years.”
 

Chuck and Sue spent Sunday May 2nd with the Salvation Army as the rains kept falling and the creeks and rivers kept rising. Their responsibility was feeding over 75 emergency workers and 911 dispatch operators at the Emergency Operations Center. “Think ‘war room’ with jumbo screens on every wall flashing news reports, radar maps and flood charts,” they explain. “The Mayor, representatives from Fire, Police, Health, power companies, etc., all fielded phone calls and information.  In three other rooms, dispatch operators tried to keep up with emergency calls. At one point the wait to get a "non-emergency" operator was over an hour!”
 

Sue spent countless hours at the Hope Force office managing response efforts, organizing volunteers and answering phone calls. Chuck spent time with the Red Cross making deliveries and visiting with flood victims – ready to listen and encourage people who are ready to tell their stories.
 

Sue looks back on the experience, “It's interesting living in the midst of the response effort. I found myself yesterday feeling waves of tears, thinking about friends that are out of work, businesses I've visited now closed for months, parts of the city of Nashville (which has become home) underwater and not likely to come alive again for many weeks.”
 

Hope Force experienced a miracle in the midst of the chaos – the office facilities are on the 2nd floor of a building set in a low-lying parking lot.  Normally, a routine heavy rain will flood the parking lot with three to four inches of standing water. This time, with over 15 inches of pouring rain, no water reached anything inside, even on the first floor.