Waves and Waterfalls

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.