BRANTLEY COUNTY, Ga. – While Kay Floyd’s house was burning down on Tuesday, she was doing her job, helping others navigate around the Brantley County wildfire and getting them to safety as a 911 dispatcher.
Floyd lost the house that her family owned for more than 30 years on Old Highway 259.
“As my house was burning down, I’m sitting there dispatching,” she said. “It was not easy. It was not easy, but you have to do what you have to do.”
Floyd told us that this is just the latest form of loss in her family. In 2021, she lost her then-husband, her father and her mother-in-law to COVID-19.
Floyd has since remarried, and her current father-in-law, who also lives on her property, had to drive around intense flames on Tuesday to make it out alive, and he did not have much time.
Floyd told News4JAX that her son, his wife and their 1-year-old daughter were all living in the house also.
They made it out safely, but they too lost everything they had.
“[My granddaughter] lost all of her clothes, all of her toys,” Floyd said. “Every single thing that you would have for a baby. Diapers. Everything. I lost furniture. Pictures. Things that you can never replace, but I am glad that they got out.”
Floyd shared what was going through her mind while she was working, knowing her own house was being destroyed.
“In that moment, you don’t know exactly what is going on,” she said. “You just hope maybe that what you think is happening is not really happening, and you try to set that aside just to do what you need to do in that moment. It was surreal. It was surreal because all of these people are calling, and I knew what they were calling about. You hear the pleading in their voice. They need something. They don’t know what to do, but yet you are going through the same thing on the other end of that line, and you are trying to help them.”
Floyd’s sister, Lindsey Morgan, started this GoFundMe account to help her family.
“I want to be able to at least set them up with him having his tools back and him having his trailer back because that’s how he hauls things around,” Morgan said about her nephew. “That is his livelihood, and that is how he brings income in. I want him to be able to at least get that back so that he can start monetizing again and bringing the cash flow back to his family. He’s such a hard worker, and he never asks for anything.”