Imagine serving a very small community on a tiny budget with a crew of less than 15 people and an average age of about 22.
Now imagine a catastrophic storm sweeping through and ravaging that community while destroying all your equipment and even your personal vehicles.
Sounds like enough to make the average person throw up their hands and give in, but the young members of the Plum Grove Fire Department never quit as the flood waters from Hurricane Harvey continued rising, and certainly not when members of the community were also stepping up to help those in need.
"That's something I really want to stress," said Plum Grove Fire Chief Joe Johnson II, who is only 30 years old himself and became chief at age 27. "It wasn't just us. People from the entire area were coming with boats to help with rescues. It was all hands on deck."
Plum Grove sits in Liberty County about 42 miles northeast of central Houston with a population of less than 1,000 people, and it was one of the town's hit hardest by Harvey, receiving just under 50 inches of rain.
The devastation brought down on the town this summer was not the first time its fire department was reduced to virtually nothing more than its membership. When Hurricane Ike came through the area in 2008, it also swallowed up firefighting equipment and literally sent the portable firehouse afloat and out into a roadway.
During and after Harvey's devastation this year, Johnson and his 12 firefighters stayed the course for days, barely sleeping more than an hour at a time and refusing to even take time out for a shower. The exhaustive effort quickly earned the group a well-earned nickname from Rex Evans, a good friend of Johnson's and the Chief of Police at Cleveland ISD.
Evans called them "The Dirty Dozen."
"There's a photo when they finally all got a chance to sit down at the station and you can just see it on their faces," Johnson said of a picture Evans snapped of the firefighters eight days after the storm made landfall.
Johnson had sent messages to the members saying they were having a mandatory emergency meeting that day, but he instead wanted them all to just get together for a debriefing so they could decompress and vent any frustrations or concerns they had.
"And the thing is, when that meeting was done, they didn't stop. The recovery crew went right back out on their trucks. Everybody went right back to work."
Given their small number, a roll call seems like a requirement considering their effort and what they lost when the flood waters overtook their firehouse. The Dirty Dozen are Assistant Chief Christopher Loftin; Emergency Manager Coordinator Jennifer Flanery; Lieutenants Casey Goraum and Luis Tula; and firefighters Nicholas Flanery, Carley Franklin, Koven Gillie, Cody Goraum, Madison Kleinsorge, Chase Laake, Kyle Ray and Laura Tula.
The response to the situation in Plum Grove from across the country has been heartwarming. According to a list provided by Johnson, they've received a 1976 Ford Pumper on loan and were donated a 1995 Pierce Arrow Pumper from Nielsen's Fire Protection in Palmdale, CA; a 1985 Mack Pumper was donated by South Adams County, CO; and the Baltimore Fire Department has donated 10 sets of turnout gear.
"They're loving it," Chief Johnson said of the training his crew has been doing on the newly arrived pieces of apparatus. "There's nothing like training on an old-school leatherhead truck. The new rookies coming out today, they're learning on everything that's electronic. A lot of my guys didn't even know about manual pressure release valves."
Additionally, the founder of the volunteer East Coast Search & Rescue, Massachusetts firefighter Shane Brown, who worked side-by-side with Plum Grove's firefighters during and after the storm, was so touched by what he saw in the small town that he oversaw the donation of a dozen new sets of PPE and set up a YouCaring fund page with a goal of $750,000 to purchase a new apparatus.
"Any way you look at it, we're supposed to be brothers," Brown said. "This is a family. It doesn't matter what state you're in. If you've got the means to help somebody, you do it."
Plum Grove Lt. Luis Tula also set up a GoFundMe page with a more modest goal of $5,000 to help the dozen firefighters in their personal lives after they gave their all for the community.
Repair work on their station is nearly complete and the chief says new appliances and bunk room gear were ordered and should be arriving soon. The firefighters have been getting by in an 8-by-32-foot portable office building.
"Hopefully by next weekend (Oct. 7) they'll be back to normal life where they can run a shift out of an actual fire station," Johnson said. "They're ready to be back in their house."
