Life has been very busy!
But I appreciate the many emails I got asking when I am going to
continue our King Cove adventure story.
We had a fun and busy
summer down south with our family. But now we are back in King Cove and loving
it!
About the only obvious
change that happened in King Cove over the summer is that they put up signs showing
the Tsunami Evacuation Route. Personally, I think it is kind of silly because
everyone who lives here knows that if there is a tsunami, you just get to
higher ground, and there is really only one road that goes through town so that
kind of limits the options. Basically, King Cove has two elevations—sea level,
and “a little higher.” So if a tsunami comes through, I would opt to go “a
little higher.”
King Cove is built kind of
like a barbell with the two ends connected by a road. There is the original part
of town that is down at sea level and has the harbor, the fish cannery, a
couple of small stores, a few houses, two churches, two bars, and some other
buildings…including the old school. Last year we lived in the sea level part of
town. There is a ribbon of road about 1 ½ miles long that runs from that end of
town, up along the side of a hill to the other half of town where we live now.
Here is most of the housing, the clinic, and the new school.
There was really nothing
wrong with the old school. In fact, it is still used for a variety of things.
The gym is used every evening for kids to go hang out and play basketball. The
rooms have been turned into businesses like a second-hand store, a daycare, and
a coffee shop that sells java and soft serve ice milk. The old school was built
much like the town…two halves with an adjoining hallway. However, the
elementary half was recently sold to the cannery (I heard they needed more
living space for their employees), so the adjoining hallway was torn down.
The reason the new school
was built is the same reason the signs were put up…people worry about tsunamis.
And since the old school was about 3 feet above sea level, that didn’t engender
much confidence in the safety of the children if a giant wave were to crash
through the town. So they built a new school on higher ground.
The main problem with the
new school is that the people who built it were morons. They were building it
in an area that sees monsoon-style storms with hurricane-force winds, yet they
used a plan that had been drawn up for the deserts of Arizona. They knew from
the start that the building would leak. And sure enough, when the rainy season
hit, within a short time the place was dripping like crazy. Waterfalls developed.
When the custodians crawled into the attic to figure out where the leaks were
coming from, they discovered five-gallon buckets already hanging in strategic
places. The people who built the place had anticipated the mess and were hoping
to stave off the leaks until the one year “warranty” period was up. But they
had grossly underestimated the Aleutian rains. They should have hung ten-gallon
buckets. So the unethical morons returned, red faced and armed with about 30
cases of caulking. This caulk Band-Aid managed to help them creep past the
warranty period before the building began its seasonal leaking again. So the
district is now embroiled in a lawsuit.
But other than the problem
of occasional indoor waterfalls, I like our school. It is beautiful and new and
on “a little higher” ground. You know…just in case a rogue wave happens to head
our way.
