Writing Through The Grief with Tom Fox | Ep. 65

On this week’s episode of The True North Show I am joined by Tom Fox who shares the incredible account of what happened in Texas Hill Country in July 2025 when the Guadalupe River raged and flooded the community. By way of processing his grief, Tom approached the Mayor and asked if he could write a book about what happened on that day and to share the stories of those who lost their lives and the community members who stepped in to rebuild. Tom’s journey has been one of resilience and remembering and it is obvious that what happened still affects him today. Our conversation is both deeply personal and inspiring, I am so grateful to Tom for sharing his story.

Bio:

Tom Fox is an author, risk strategist, and longtime authority on preparedness, governance, and systemic risk, widely known as The Voice of Compliance.

For more than three decades he has helped organizations understand how systems fail, how warning signs get ignored, and what leaders must recognize before consequences become irreversible.

He is the founder of two podcast networks, the Compliance Podcast Network and the Texas Hill Country Podcast Network. His book, Deluge Before Dawn: Heartbreak, Survival, and Resilience After the Guadalupe River Raged, examines the catastrophic Texas Hill Country floods as both a human tragedy and a case study in foreseeable risk. Drawing on scientific research, investigative reporting, historical precedent, and lived community impact, the book explores failures across warning systems, infrastructure, institutional decision-making, and preparedness.

The book debuted as a Best Seller on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Rather than focusing on blame or sensationalism, Tom examines what communities, institutions and leaders must recognize before the next inevitable crisis arrives.

He has described the process as “writing through the grief,” while remaining firmly focused on prevention, preparedness, and responsibility moving forward.

Use this link to purchase Tom’s book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1965766757?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Social Media

Website: www.compliancepodcastnetwork.net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomas.fox.77

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/VoiceOfCompliance

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasfox13/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompliancePodcastNetwork

Transcript:

[00:34] Megan North:
Hello and welcome to the True North Show. I’m your host Megan North. Today I am joined by Tom Fox, an author, risk strategist, and longtime authority on preparedness, governance, and systemic risk, widely known as the voice of compliance.

For more than three decades he has helped organisations understand how systems fail, how warning signs get ignored, and what leaders must recognise before consequences become irreversible. He is the founder of two podcast networks, the Compliance Podcast Network and the Texas Hill Country Podcast Network. His book, Deluge Before Dawn: Heartbreak, Survival, and Resilience After the Guadalupe River Raged, examines the catastrophic Texas Hill Country floods as both a human tragedy and a case study in foreseeable risk. Drawing on scientific research, investigative reporting, historical precedent, and lived community impact, the book explores failures across warning systems, infrastructure, institutional decision making, and preparedness. The book debuted as a bestseller on Amazon and Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago. Rather than focusing on blame and sensationalism, Tom examines what communities, institutions, and leaders must recognise before the next inevitable crisis arrives. He has described the process as writing through the grief while remaining firmly focused on prevention, preparedness, and responsibility moving forward.

Tom, welcome to the True North Show.

[02:29] Tom Fox:
Megan, I’m delighted to be here with you today.

[02:31] Megan North:
I’m so thrilled that we are spending this time together. So Tom has spent more than three decades studying how systems fail, how warning signs get ignored, and what happens when the consequences become irreversible. And then the unthinkable happened right in his own hometown.

Tom, before we go deeply into the book and the circumstances around why you wrote it, are you able to share what led you to a thirty-plus-year career in compliance? Was it a true north calling moment, or was it something you stumbled into?

[03:12] Tom Fox:
So thank you for the thirty years. Unfortunately it is forty years.

[03:18] Megan North:
I said thirty plus, so.

[03:21] Tom Fox:
I’ll take that. So I am a recovering trial lawyer, and in the trial lawyer world I handled massive catastrophic personal injury claims and property damage losses. Think chemical plant explosions, that sort of thing. One case where a ship went down with all hands lost. And so I began to look at the causes of failure. And my first aha moment was: it is never one thing. It is always a series of things. And is there a point at which if you had done something different, that series would have been broken? In the cases I was handling, it had not happened. So I was dealing with death and destruction.

Then I went from the trial lawyer world to the corporate world and changed focus a little to contracts. But it gave me the chance to travel all over the world. I got to live in Dubai, circle the globe three times a year, did contracts on every continent except Antarctica. I became to appreciate the detail in contract work and how you can actually manage risk through contract terms and conditions, both legal and commercial.

Then I became the general counsel of a company that had violated a US law which prevents US companies from engaging in bribery and corruption outside the United States. So that was the first formal compliance angle. And I learned from that experience about that law and how to comply with it. The company got sold, my job went away, and I decided to go out on my own.

What I really wanted to do was race bicycles. I was over fifty, I could ride in the senior division. So I went on this great adventure doing 40K races until one day I got hit by a car, which ended my cycling career. And so as one tends to do when one has one of those types of events, you think about what you really want to do with your life. I decided I would have to go back to work. And I really enjoyed compliance work, but what I really liked was building systems inside corporations: policies and procedures, continuous monitoring, auditing, all of the basic building blocks of a compliance programme. That led to risk management. So for about the last eighteen years I have focused heavily on that. And it does not matter what the risk is. It can be bribery, corruption, money laundering, sanctions, export controls, or a physical risk that happened in my home county.

So that is my professional journey, which took me up to the point of the flood.

[06:16] Megan North:
Wow. And as a child, were you one of those kids who loved structure and always followed the rules? Was the compliance and systems process always something that resonated with you?

[06:31] Tom Fox:
So I grew up in a small town in Texas and all we cared about was sports. We all played sports and that was all we did, all we talked about, before school, during school, after school. I always did very well in school, so that really was not a problem for me. But let’s just say I did not have a lot of focus outside sports.

[07:01] Megan North:
Right, okay. But I guess the thing is that sports does bring in that system and structure. So maybe there was something there in the background for you that led you to this. So you’ve travelled the globe constantly. The only place you have not been is Antarctica.

[07:21] Tom Fox:
And I’m gonna go there someday.

[07:24] Megan North:
Yes, it is on my husband’s and my list. We’re going in a couple of years so I will share everything with you.

[07:31] Tom Fox:
Right.

[07:33] Megan North:
So let’s focus on the book. Can you take us back to July 2025, when the river flooded? What happened that day, and what did it feel like to witness your community being torn apart?

[07:54] Tom Fox:
So July the fourth is a very important holiday in America. It’s the birth of our country. It is my favourite holiday and I greatly look forward to it every year. Where I live, we had had some rain but nothing out of the ordinary or extraordinary. And so my wife and I get up about five-thirty or six and I wake up to these texts: are you okay? And then at six-thirty, a woman who is a friend of mine but who I could not ever remember calling me, she calls and says: are you okay? I’m like, what are you talking about? Well, everyone outside of where I was living knew that a massive flood had hit the Guadalupe River, which goes right down the middle of Kerr County. And they did not know how close we were to the river, so everyone was checking in.

The biggest town in my county is twenty thousand people. We have no TV, we have no radio, we have Facebook. So we started looking on Facebook and we started seeing videos of people who had gone down to the river to show how high it was. And we were like: my gosh. And all we knew was what we were seeing in Kerrville. Well, Kerrville is twenty miles downstream from where the river starts. And my first thought was: well, if it is thirty-five feet in Kerrville, what is it like upstream?

And it was just breaking daylight so no one knew how bad it was. And it was not bad. It was the worst ever. As daylight broke and reports started coming in of people missing. At that point they were not reporting deaths. It was clear a major catastrophe had happened. Then there was one girls’ camp that most people have heard of, where twenty-five campers aged eight and two counsellors were swept out of their cabins and drowned. All the reports at that point were that they were missing. After about twelve hours, it was pretty clear they were moving from rescue to recovery. There were some incredible stories of rescue. People in trees thirty feet up were rescued by helicopters and pulled out of the river. But there were not too many of those after about twelve hours.

So it was clear something catastrophic had happened. We had no real appreciation till later, when we started getting press conferences about what had happened.

[10:42] Megan North:
And did your strategic mind kick in at that time, or were you trying to manage what was going on in your own mind first? Or did you go straight into: what is happening, how can I help, how can I be organised?

[11:02] Tom Fox:
It was clear something bad had happened, we just did not know how bad. So it was not to that point yet. I think the first day or the second day, my wife and I donated and went to volunteer with Salvation Army and those sorts of folks. But the information about how bad it truly was came out later. And then I had to leave town that Sunday because I had a previous keynote speech in New York City.

So I had to leave town without really knowing how bad it was. And by the time I got to New York, it was on the national news. And it was like: this is worse than anyone could have dreamed. And I was in New York, I am an early riser, so I get up at five AM. There was a Starbucks next to the hotel. I went in and there was a sign for donations for the flood victims. I asked the manager: did corporate give you this already? She said: yes, the minute there is a disaster they are asking for donations. They had a QR code. So I was able to learn more in New York, but I also felt bad because I was not there doing anything.

I am well known in terms of blogging and podcasting, so I was contacted by a lot of reporters for comments. And I said: guys, I am not there. I will tell you what I think I know, but the reality is I am just not there on the scene. So I was reading reports and watching Facebook like everyone else.

[12:44] Megan North:
And it is funny how these things can happen in our lives where usually you would be there but you needed to step away from it. And I wonder whether that distance gave you time to collect your thoughts and come back as a clearer thinker, as opposed to being in the energy of the catastrophe at that time.

[13:26] Tom Fox:
It is really two different things. One was: I felt incredibly guilty because I was not there. And the second thing was, one of my good friends in my compliance life wrote a long LinkedIn post about the tragedy. She specifically said: this is Tom’s home county, everybody knows Tom, everybody loves Tom, and I am asking you to make a donation in his name. And that moved me more than anything. I have tried to tell her that. I really do not even have the words.

It turned out the compliance community and several businesses in the compliance world stepped up and made donations because of her post. And then I lost a friend in the flood. We all lost friends in the flood. It was a woman who I had interviewed for a podcast. I replayed her podcast and she was a true servant. That generated a lot of attention and a lot of people stepped up and made donations where they could. But I was in New York for the week on this other previously scheduled engagement.

[14:52] Megan North:
And so when you sat down to write, were you writing for your own personal healing journey, or did you know from the beginning you were writing a book?

[15:04] Tom Fox:
This event bothered me more than probably any other event in my life that was not the death of a parent. And it bothered me more than nine eleven, which I did not think was possible. It bothered me because I knew people who died. I knew the destruction. I went to summer camp in that part of the county. That is why I moved to this part of Texas, because of the beauty of it.

And I really struggled with what was my role in the recovery. One of the things that happened, and I write about it in the book, is the community stepped up and said: we are going to take care of ourselves. Financially, spiritually, from a mental health perspective. We are going to do as much as we can to help ourselves. We are not going to sit around and wait for the government.

Literally the day of the flood, charitable entities were created. By Monday the framework was in place for the economic recovery. The churches stepped up in their own ways. The mental health facilities all opened their doors to anyone who needed mental health help. I saw all of this going on and I really struggled with what I should do.

I thought, well, maybe as a lawyer I can help people fill out loan forms or something. But nothing seemed right. And finally, about two weeks later, one night it just came to me: you need to write the book.

I should say a friend of mine in town had told me the second day after the event: you need to tell the story. I kind of brushed that off, but he was right. So I decided I had to write the book.

I went to the mayor. It is a small town, everybody knows everybody. I literally went to his store and said: what would you think if I wrote the book? And he said: I think that would be a great idea, Tom. And the woman who died, I was better friends with her mother, because her mother ran the boys’ summer camp that I went to as a child. So I went to see her and asked: could I write a chapter about your daughter Jane? And she said: I think that would be wonderful.

I do not know what I would have done if the mayor had said no or if Kathy, Jane’s mother, had said no. But I do not have to answer that question.

I decided to start the day after Labor Day. And I got up at four AM every day for the next five months to write. And that is what I did.

[18:15] Megan North:
And wow, what an incredible debut book to write. When you say riding through the grief, I could just imagine that it would have come flooding out.

[18:49] Tom Fox:
This is my first book of general nonfiction. I have written a lot of books in compliance, business leadership, business ethics, risk management. So I can write. But I belong to a fellowship that says if you have an issue you have to write about it to get through it. And for me it was deep grief. I thought, okay, I have never taken that advice from my fellowship, but I will this time.

I started writing. About two weeks in I had not really accomplished much and I told my wife: I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew here. And she looked at me and said: stop it. You are a lawyer. This is no different than any other project you have ever done. You research it and you write it. The only difference is you are interviewing people. Just go do it.

[19:48] Megan North:
Yeah.

[19:49] Tom Fox:
And I thought: she is right. As always. So I wrote the science chapter first because that was the research chapter. This county has had multiple floods for the last hundred years, about every twenty years a catastrophic flood. It has been studied from an academic perspective. There was a lot of academic work I could read and synthesise to understand the science. And the flooding here is so prevalent that the county is called Flash Flood Alley. There is a reason for that. It is the geology, the hydrology, the shape of the canyons, the way the river flows from basically three thousand feet to two thousand feet in just a couple of miles. It has only got one way to go. And then of course meteorology. So I studied all of that and wrote that chapter.

Then I started interviewing people. I only interviewed people who were willing to speak with me. But that was the hard part. A lot of tears, a lot of tears in the interviews, and a lot of my tears, a lot of tears in writing. Some heartbreaking stories. Some stories of incredible resilience.

And I just went through and I decided I would start at the beginning of where the flood started, following the river downstream. One woman got a knock at the door: get out now. She and her husband got up, got dressed, put shoes on, grabbed the dog. By the time they got to the car, it was underwater.

There was one family, grandparents, parents, grandchildren. One of the young children was scared by the storm, it was so loud. About two-thirty in the morning, the dad decided: let’s just go check this out. It is a two-storey house. He gets everybody downstairs, they put their shoes on. Their house is ripped off its foundation and goes into the river.

And then a woman who lived with her ninety-year-old mother woke up to water over her bed. She gets up, tells her mum: we have got to go. And the mother says: I cannot walk. And she tells her daughter: you have to leave now. And you know exactly what that means. So she climbs out a window, gets on the roof, stays there for two hours. Her mother is in bed, but the water rises, the bed rises, it is a vaulted ceiling, and the sides of the bed catch on the ceiling and create an air pocket. When the river recedes, the bed just goes back down. People see her on the roof and help her down. They go in. Her mother survived the whole thing.

There were two RV parks. One RV park had one hundred percent loss. Every RV was swept into the river and everyone died. In the RV park next to it, the owner lived on site. She went RV to RV banging on doors: get out now. Do not turn your RV on, get out now. With one exception, she got everyone out.

Then I turned to the start of the recovery. I decided to focus on the 911 operators. In America, 911 is our emergency number. They had made transcripts of those calls, which is a public record, so we could get them. And there was a level of professionalism that was beyond my comprehension. Where are you? Nobody is coming. Get to your roof. Get to higher ground. Nobody is coming because the roads were already washed out. And early on, one of the 911 operators, just on his own, activated an alert that put an entire regional hospital network on call. The hospitals were ready for a mass casualty event.

I told the story of the man who runs the city of Kerrville. He is a professional, not an elected official. I did not know this, but he was ex-Special Forces. When he figured out what was going on, he went into what he calls mission mode. Three days without sleep. He set up the emergency operations centres.

The head of the community foundation in Kerr County had been running it for eight years, averaging about five million dollars a year in donations. In six months, he got one hundred and fifty million dollars. But because he had set the entity up with the infrastructure for transparency, auditability, and ensuring the money would go to those in need, he was able to start that process immediately and get money out.

The Chamber of Commerce had a separate fund, run by a local woman who had grown up there and who had been there all her life. When people showed up with their hands out, she either knew them or knew of them. And when someone showed up who was not genuine, she knew.

One of the most dramatic stories for me was the bus drivers.

Near the end of the fourth of July, all the campers in West Kerr County, including girls from the camp that had been devastated, still had no transport home. One of the camps texted the school superintendent. He put out a text and thirty bus drivers showed up. Twenty were professionals, ten were coaches. In Texas, athletic coaches are required to hold a bus driving licence in case they need to transport their team. One man was now a school principal who had not driven a bus in ten years. One woman had got her licence on the first of July. Three days earlier. She had never driven a bus other than in a driving test.

In less than thirty minutes they put a convoy together and headed out to pick up the kids. No vehicles had been over some of the washed-out bridges. They had no idea what they were going to see. They had no idea whether the roads were safe. They were the first non-emergency responders to see the devastation. Houses and trees thirty feet up. Clothes in trees. Cars smashed around trees. And if there was a big X on something, that meant it had been checked for a body. And they did not know that at the time. They saw all of that.

They went out, picked the kids up, and brought them back. And some of the girls knew their friends had been washed away. They did not know yet that they had died. They were taken back to the reunification centres. Parents waiting. And some parents looking for children who were not coming.

Those bus drivers were some of the greatest heroes in my mind. They were just regular people doing incredibly heroic things.

Then I looked at how do you get through your grief? I found a painter friend who created a painting called Lean on Me: a dead cypress leaning on a live cypress tree. I interviewed her. I interviewed the head of our western museum, who put together a remembrance garden. I interviewed the conductor of the symphony about the requiem he played at the first performance after the flood. It was really about how do you get through your own grief through art? And for each of them, they certainly did it for the community, but they also did it for themselves. Much like I did.

Then I tried to turn to not so much why did this happen, but how can we prevent it happening again? The state government was asking for a warning system. But a warning system is only part of the equation because you have to have adequate, accurate measurement to know when to warn. We did not have that. Ten years ago the county had tried to get it and the state would not fund it. The man who had led that effort ten years ago was still around. On the fourth of July he drew out on a napkin what needed to be done. He was a former NASA engineer. He took it to the river authority. They had been thinking the same thing. They paired up, went to the state, showed what was needed, and got funding. That effort has been ongoing.

I also got interested in how the local media told the story because I was a consumer of their information. We have no TV station, no radio station. We have a three-day-a-week newspaper, a one-day-a-week paper, and a man who does a daily news show on Facebook. Each had a different focus. The Facebook guy wanted to be first, every time. The three-day-a-week paper said: I want to be right. I am not publishing anything unless it is double-sourced. The one-day-a-week paper is in the part of the county where the flood originated. The woman who runs it has been doing it on her own for twenty years. She had more contacts in that part of the county than anyone. And so I tried to tell their story to help people understand the importance of local journalism. Newspapers are dying, local journalism is dying. And I saw that local journalists are really in the fabric of the community.

So I got all of that done and still was not through the grief. I had to write the lessons learned chapter. I know how to do that from my compliance work. I sat down because I did not want to point fingers. I wanted to say: these are the lessons we have to learn, and to make sure it does not happen again. Because it will. The science tells us it will happen again. There is no once-in-a-lifetime thing in my mind.

Then the final chapter was about the river itself. The river is the lifeblood of this county and I struggled with how something that beautiful could turn into something deadly. The mayor of our town is also our historian, nearly seventy, and he had a great body of work I could draw from. So I ended the book with a coda to the river.

And then I wrote the chapter about my friend who died: Jane Ragsdail. She had run a girls’ summer camp. It was literally three days between camp sessions. New campers were due to arrive on Sunday the sixth of July. There was no one there but her. She got to the roof and was swept off. It turned out she had a fascinating career. She had been a journalist, she had been in Central America during the civil wars, in Argentina during the Falkland War. She had gone back to run the summer camp. She was a board of trustees member at the university, a deacon at her church, heavily involved in charities, and she had an entire other life doing mission work in Guatemala that even I did not know about.

She spoke fluent Spanish. So I got to tell that story. And I got to honour her in a way that I felt her mother really appreciated.

[38:09] Megan North:
And Tom, what is really obvious to me as you share all of this is that there was some type of organisation in the background that identified how people could help, because people knew what their role was and they stepped in and did what they were good at. I think that is probably one of the things that made this run smoother than what I have seen before. Because a lot of people really want to help but do not know what to do.

[39:19] Tom Fox:
Well, I will not say it was very organised to start. It was much more ad hoc. It was individual people stepping up. Like there was a family university professor who had just been going to start at the university and came down for the fourth. Their house was not available yet and they were staying at one of the cabins along the river. They were able to get to safety. And this person turned out to be a swiftwater rescue expert. He made calls to every non-governmental swiftwater rescue body from Mexico to Czechoslovakia. People came with their boats to help in the river recovery. He was an example of just people stepping up. I hate to use the word coincidence, but all these people did extraordinary things and they were just like you and me.

[40:28] Megan North:
Yeah. Wow. And in those moments of writing and getting up at four AM and going through the process of grief and sharing the story, what motivated you when there were times where it felt too overwhelming? What got you through from a mental health point of view?

[40:56] Tom Fox:
I am a lawyer. Once I take on a project, I finish it.

[40:58] Megan North:
Right, okay.

[41:00] Tom Fox:
Probably high school athletics. Keep going, keep going, keep going. There is a wall. Just hit it until it breaks.

[41:09] Megan North:
Yeah, okay.

[41:12] Tom Fox:
So I had a publisher, I had signed a contract. But once I decided to do it, that was it.

[41:20] Megan North:
And what was the reason behind not wanting to sensationalise or blame? What is that in you that wanted to focus on the stories and on how to improve the system?

[41:37] Tom Fox:
Because I saw my professional background in risk management as actually part of the solution. Our governor, two days afterwards, when someone said: when are you going to do an after-action report, he said: that is for losers, we do not do that here. And I am like: no, governor, that is how you make improvements. You see what the root cause was and then you remediate or fix it as best you can. It is a pretty simple process. You identify the risk, you put together a risk management strategy, you train on that strategy, you implement it, and then you improve as necessary.

I knew that by assigning blame and pointing fingers, no one was going to listen. And I do not want to be part of that discussion anyway. I wanted to try to point towards solutions.

And then I had never been in a place where the national press descended on my hometown like they did. It was like an invading army came. And all they wanted was: who is to blame? How did this happen? How can you live with that on your conscience? And then they left. And they really did not solve or resolve anything. There was plenty of sensationalism. I just did not want to be part of it. I wanted to honour the dead and their memories.

[43:37] Megan North:
And given that this is the area you have worked in for a long time, what do you think it is about human nature and institutional behaviour that makes it so resistant to acting on what is already known? Why do people not want to step in and change processes?

[44:06] Tom Fox:
We have always done it this way.

[44:07] Megan North:
Right, okay. Yeah.

[44:13] Tom Fox:
And we remember the thirty-two flood. It only got up to thirty feet there. It will never get to forty feet.

[44:18] Megan North:
Yeah. So foreseeable risk feels like it has two meanings to it. What does it actually mean for a community or an institution to know that something is coming and still not act?

[44:52] Tom Fox:
Well, let me answer in a different way. We had a thousand-year flood on the fourth of July 2025. Well, on the sixteenth of July 2026, we had a five-hundred-year flood. But it came from a different direction and impacted the county differently. And we only had one death.

The reason we only had one death was the National Weather Service put out warnings. All of the cell phone providers amplified those warnings every hour. And everyone on Facebook did the same. So everyone knew the water was coming from a different direction, down through town. There was catastrophic flooding and catastrophic property damage, but only one person died. Because people got out of the way.

Now, another difference is that in Kerrville, the town, cell phone service is reliable. In West Kerr County it was spotty on a good day. There were people who never got the limited warnings to get out. But in the town, the warnings came, they were amplified, people had cell phones and they knew what this meant because everyone remembered 2025. So we did learn some lessons. We did implement those lessons. Unfortunately it took what it took to put those in place. It is a lack of imagination.

[46:34] Megan North:
Yeah. So it is in that square box of: but we have always done it this way. No imagination, no thinking about what is outside the box. So interesting. So through this process, is there a highlight, and I am not being disrespectful when I say highlight, but is there a moment through writing the book where you just thought: wow, this is something I will always remember?

[47:14] Tom Fox:
Well, I felt it before I wrote the book. This was to help me get through my grief. And it did. And halfway through I thought: maybe it will help others get through their grief. Because there is still a lot of grieving going on. I hope it will help others.

But if there is one word, it is: remember. We have to remember. We have to remember to honour the dead. And we have to remember what happened so that we do not let it happen again.

The last major flood was in 2002. Almost a whole generation. There were people who did not know about the 2002 flood. Well, in 2045, are we going to be in the same situation? I hope not, because we now have a measurement and warning system. But I hope we have the political will to maintain that system and not have somebody say: that is never going to happen again, let us quit wasting money on that.

[48:16] Megan North:
Yeah. And what is next for you in relation to this book? Is this a one-time-only kind of book or have you found something different inside yourself in the way you write?

[48:48] Tom Fox:
Well, I have always loved writing. I would love to be able to write full time. I have two next books I have pitched to my publisher. The first is a full biography of Jane Ragsdail, to really tell the incredible story of her life. And the second is about what the community did in terms of recovery, which I actually see as a framework for other communities. Part of it is because the US government has cut back on its responses to these kinds of disasters. But what I saw was a community taking charge of its own recovery. And I think it really is a framework.

Getting people back into their homes is the most important thing, even more than having new clothes. But the spiritual component, the mental health component, the business recovery component. The county literally depends on tourism for a large part of its commercial business. In July one of my friends at a furniture store had one visitor. The museum had six people. So how can we help the businesses recover? Because they generate tax revenue which allows us to do all of those things. And there is Habitat for Humanity, who accelerated their home-building programme and then their home-repair programme. Cash grants for deposits to buy homes. Low-interest loans. All of these things to get people back into their homes and back up and running.

[50:42] Megan North:
And just before we wrap up, when you said the last chapter was about the river, was there a part of you that had to find forgiveness with the river?

[50:59] Tom Fox:
Well, that is an interesting way to phrase it. I did not have to forgive the river. I had to forgive myself for forgetting what the river is. Because the river is the lifeblood of our county. And the county heals as the river heals. Over sixty percent of the vegetation along the river was wiped out, which is catastrophic for the environment. But rivers rage. And it does not matter where you live, your river could rage. It could be a lot of rain, a catastrophic flood. So we need to remember that rivers are the givers of life, but they can rage. And I had to realise it is not always the most beautiful, tranquil place I have ever seen. I have to respect that. And I have to be ready.

The National Weather Service said: when you get a watch, put a plan in place. When you get a warning, execute that plan. So that is my responsibility.

[52:13] Megan North:
Yeah. That is really beautiful. Tom, thank you for sharing this time with me today. I have got so much gratitude for you sharing this. What a beautiful journey you have been on, albeit from a catastrophic event. I think this book has definitely been a healing journey for you, and I suspect a beautiful healing journey for so many others. And I also think people who have experienced other tragedies will find something in it. I think this book is not just for the people in your town and your county. I think it is wider than that. So thank you for having the courage to write about this. I think it is really special.

[53:03] Tom Fox:
Thank you very much, Megan.

[53:05] Megan North:
You are welcome. And I would also like to thank all of my amazing and dedicated audience, my supporters, and again to my sponsors. I hope everybody has an amazing rest of the week. I look forward to seeing you all again next week. And again, thank you so much, Tom.

[53:20] Tom Fox:
Thank you.