6 Things Families Tell This Disaster Volunteer At The Door On Day Four. Then She Walks Inside.

"That's what the father said," she told me. "Grey skin. Hands cracked raw to the wrist from scrubbing."

Behind him, taped to the garage wall, was a printed emergency checklist.

Every single box ticked.

Water. Food. Flashlights. Radio. Generator.

"He was the most prepared man on that street," she said. "I could tell from the garage."

"There was just one line missing. Nobody ever writes it on the list."

"Everybody in Florida does it," she said. "Their mothers did it."

But when the pumps under the street lose power, the pipe out of the house is already full.

Every bucket goes in, and it has to come out somewhere.

"That house, it came up through the tub," she said. "The tub their four-year-old took her baths in. There was a rubber duck floating in it."

"They always did," she said.

The official list says to pack "garbage bags and plastic ties (for personal sanitation)."

So they did.

"And the bag split down the seam the first time somebody lifted it full."

"It was on the floor. On the rim. On the kids' legs. On the door handle," she said. "And there was no running water to wash any of it off."

"I counted five bottles in that house," she said. "Sink. Toilet tank. Hallway table. His back pocket."

"All nearly empty."

The stomach bug that tears through a house after a storm is usually norovirus. The cruise ship virus.

A sick person can shed huge amounts of virus particles.

And soap and running water are especially important for proper handwashing.

"He'd been carrying it from child to child on his own two hands," she said. "Thinking he was protecting them."

"That's what the mother said," Dana told me. "From the bathroom floor. She couldn't stand up."

The son was on the couch, grey, a mixing bowl beside him.

And the youngest was on the tile.

"Four years old," Dana said. "Cheek flat on the floor, because the tile was the only cool thing left in that house."

"I knelt down and said her name. She whimpered. And no tears came out."

"That's the one I'm most afraid of. It means she's drying out."

"But she turned her head toward my voice. She was still with us."

"Day four, the map was still red," she said. "The bridge was closed. Power lines down across the main road."

She sealed the bathroom first, using the sanitation supplies she carries in her truck, so nothing else went on that floor.

Then she carried the little girl to the truck.

"Her father held her across his lap. I drove. Forty minutes the long way around."

"Every few minutes she squeezed his finger. That's what kept my foot on the gas."

At the hospital, they put an IV in her arm.

Her father sat in a plastic chair and said, "I had everything. I did everything they told me to do."

"He did," Dana said. "Every word of that was true. And it nearly wasn't enough."

By morning she was sitting up, drinking apple juice through a bendy straw, asking for her brother.

That was a house Dana got to in time.