On August 4th 2009, or as we refer to it now as the Great Flood of 09, the basement at the lodge took a direct hit and had five feet of water. We lost several old records going back to 1902, but we were able to recover many others. It’s going to be a long process of drying them out and re-filing them. I have them at home in my deep freeze, and we are taking them out a bag at a time and drying them slowly.

It has been three weeks now and we have started rebuilding the basement offices back and hope to be back in operation by the middle of September. Some have express their concerns about us going back to the basement with our offices but this may never happen again, and we are using this experience to learn from our mistakes. Such as all important file and equipment will be stored on the second floor. All we can do at this point is hope to minimize our losses if it was to happen again.

Suburban Lodge is strong and we will survive this. Many of our members also had flood damage to their own homes, such as our Master, Mark Galloway, for one. We are doing the restoration of the basement ourselves in order to save some money. Insurance covered most of the damage, such as the $8,850.00 repairs to the elevator and the $10,000.00 clean up, and $5,000.00 to the lost of the newsletter equipment. We have received some donations from some of the members that will be used to replace computers and office equipment. I would like to thank all who have pitched in to help with this effort.

Fraternally Thine,
Joe Marshall - Secretary