I grew up on Long Island, NY, in Smithtown. Years later, after graduating from college and working as a technical engineer at ESPN, I had the opportunity to move back to Smithtown. I was suffering from early cataracts in both eyes, and a high school buddy is rated the best eye doctor and surgeon in the tri-state area and was set to do my surgery. Meanwhile, a mutual friend offered to let me live with him during the surgeries.
Throughout 2012, as I recovered from surgery and then later when I took a position as the videographer at an animal rescue documenting their rescues, I lived in that buddy’s folks’ home. It was a 300-plus-year-old three-story house that used to be a gristmill at the basin of the Nissequogue River.
A year later, that old house got a little too much for the family to maintain, so my friend moved to New Jersey, and I moved across Long Island.
Then came August of 2024, and a powerful rainstorm dropped 21 inches in 10 hours between Sunday night and Monday morning. The heavy rains and flash flooding damaged roads and broke two local dams. According to requests for assistance those Long Island floods damaged more than 1,000 properties.
I was two years into my Greyshirt journey by this point. I had joined Team Rubicon as a volunteer—or Greyshirt—during the pandemic after contacting my local VA and rehab facilities to volunteer and finding they didn’t have any openings. Instead, they put me in contact with Team Rubicon and my first deployment was to Punta Gorda, FL, the week of Thanksgiving for TR’s Hurricane Ian response. By the time the Long Island floods hit Smithtown in ’24, I had already deployed everywhere from Selma, AL, for a tornado response, to the Navajo Nation, where we supplemented tribal recovery efforts after severe winter storms and flooding, to Florida in response to various hurricanes.
Now, I had the chance to serve in my own backyard and hometown.
On my first day on the Long Island floods operation, I was deployed to Smithtown and assigned to a muck-out team. Amazingly, our team was assigned to the same house I had lived in in 2012. My buddy had passed away in 2018, and I had been living out of the area, so I missed his service, but the old gristmill home stood.
I arrived at the house to speak with the owners—my friend’s aunts—and they broke down crying when they saw me standing in their yard. It was in that moment that I realized why I joined Team Rubicon. We sat and cried and hugged and remembered the time I lived there.
Then, we Greyshirts got to work. The house had been devastated. Water from the floods had filled 7 feet of the first floor of the home, and muck and mud were everywhere. As the days went on, we removed so many of the family’s waterlogged belongings that the owners found a funeral memorial card of my friend who had lived in the house with me. It was the only one left after the funeral. The family presented it to me on our last day clearing out their home. They told me that it was God’s doing that I was brought there to help them, and also his way of uniting us so I could receive the memorial card of my high school friend.
I’ve lived through disasters myself, including Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, and Sandy—the last of which had me volunteering daily—and I’ve now served on about 10 operations as a Greyshirt with Team Rubicon. Each has been eye-opening and emotional in its own way. Serving at the Veterans Resource Center in Asheville after Hurricane Helene, and being there on Veterans Day 2024 and being part of the ceremony where we handed the VRC back to them so they can start redoing all the apartments, was definitely a top three in terms of emotions. But this operation in my own backyard, serving a family I knew, at a home I had once lived in, was a different kind of emotional experience, and an opportunity I’ll never forget.
