Matt Wall ��� Mitigation is essentially any action that a person can take in advance of an event occurring to protect themselves or their property from damage, from hazard, and overall health preservation.

Bain Schultz ��� I think that the big decision was that we never wanted to have to go through that again, we never wanted to have to worry about gutting our house and worrying about the flood.  

Well, we lost a couple trees, but we had two feet of water in our house so we gutted our entire house four feet down, took all the plumbing, electrical out four feet down.  So everything���s new four feet.  That���s a 100 year old house, but four feet down is brand new.  And we changed our��� we had a single car garage we turned that into a screened in porch.  And that���s the thing, our house was 100 years old and it���s never flooded that bad.  The people that lived in our house before us lived there 23 years and never had a problem.

Well it���s flooded 3 times, we just recently had a really bad nor���easter where  we couldn���t get out of the house for two days and we were an island.  And that was just very confident, it took us three hours to get ready for the storm and then we just sat in the house and knew that we���re OK, everything���s off the ground you know we knew exactly what to do.  

The people in the yellow house, we became best friends because of that you know we���d work on each other���s houses.  These two, and then there���s on down at the end that���s raised that���s really high up about nine feet and then the other one on the other side of the street she���s actually gonna raise her house in the next couple of months.

Matt Wall ��� We���re actually very fortunate that a tremendous number of people all up and down the coast of Virginia, especially in the peninsula regions and the Tidewater and Hampton regions there have been home elevations that have been done in Hampton, that have been done in Norfolk, that have been done in Poquoson, Accomack County, Gloucester County so people are aware of this. 

Bain Schultz ��� I mean it saved the flood insurance a lot of money, I mean it was a really good investment for them to pay us to raise the house instead of paying three more times to have new wiring, new plumbing, new electricity, new insulation, so to me the cost was, and maybe, it���s hard to say, because at the time you think oh that���ll never happen again but now it���s happened three times.