Not Your Typical Weekend

This last weekend, Mike and I had the opportunity to go to Little Rock, Arkansas for work. On a typical weekend, the typical family spends time sleeping, relaxing, having fun, and maybe starting a load of laundry. Not the Watkins family! We are volunteers for Farmers Insurance and we got called out to help with the tornadoes that hit early on Friday morning. They called us on Friday morning and asked us to find the soonest flight out there to help out.

As soon as we got to Little Rock, they had a car waiting for us and a hotel to go to. We were there from Saturday morning to late Monday night. A long weekend but it was worth it.

We were able to leave early Saturday morning and arrived to the MCC (Mobile Command Center-pictured below) at about 1:30 that afternoon. We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up from lunch, getting everything ready on the bus and assisting any insureds that needed to file claims and just being there to talk to.

Sunday morning we made breakfast for anyone that would like it, coffee, and then lunch a little bit later. After lunch we were able to go out to all the houses close by that had already filed claims and put signs in their yards to make it easier for the adjusters to find their houses when they came to look at them. This is when we really saw all the damage that the tornadoes did.

This is a picture of a home that another insurance company wasn't going to be out (even to come and look at it) for another 2 weeks. It was really cool to see what an impact Farmers had on the town and how we take so much pride in being there to help everyone when they are in need. We had a lot of people just come up to us and tell us that they don't have Farmers right now, and they didn't have any kind of a claim, but it really impressed them that we were the only insurance company there doing this. They asked for a local agent's name and number so they could sign up. This was really cool to see.

A lot of the damage that was there was just shingle and fence damage and quite a few that trees fell onto homes. A few of the Farmers insureds were quite so lucky as that. These houses had to have structural engineers come out to see if they needed to be completely re built. This was really sad but at the same time really cool to see how fast Farmers was in getting them taken care of.

I felt really bad for some of the people that didn't have Farmers Insurance. There was one lady that we talked to that said that her company told her that they "might" call her back on Monday (that was Friday). By Sunday afternoon, there were multiple Farmers insureds that had checks in their hands and their claims closed, which was before some companies even contacted their insureds to set up an appointment.

It was also really interesting to see how the tornado worked. One house would be almost completely gone and the one right next to it, would be fine. It was really interesting. On one street every single house was hit except one, that guy didn't have a single shingle missing.

This weekend we were both able to see how blessed we are here in Idaho, the things that we take for granted and the luxuries that we have right now. Mike and I are truly proud be work for such a great company! This is what we do on our weekends off work.


We had everything that we could do done by Sunday night, and because we couldn't get an earlier flight out, we were able to tour Arkansas. Not the place that I would normally want to have a vacation at, but it was really cool to see.



















We crossed the Arkansas and ate at Cajun and Southern restaurants. We visited some swamps, and the capital building, went on a nature hike, saw some lizards , (I touched one!), some turtles and some really pretty butterfly's. I wanted to try to catch an alligator but Mike said that they were hibernating and that I probably couldn't catch one even if they weren't (I just think he was too scared). All in all, we had a great weekend! I hope they will call us out again soon!