FLORENCE, Ore. - A family from Florence is still recovering after January's storms leave a father and a husband paralyzed.

David Tai was driving from taking his daughter to school on January 18th when strong winds blew a tree onto his truck.

"I called my husband's phone and another guy picked up the phone. He said your husband got into a car accident," said Yik "Anita" Chin Pang, David Tai's wife. "Then everything from their changed."

The accident left Tai paralyzed.

"It's really hard," Chin said. "It's turned my life like upside down, you know."

Before the accident, Tai was a cook at Three Rivers Casino in Florence.

Since the accident, Chin has been thrown with expensive medical bills. Chin and her daughter Michelle have been forced to relocate to Eugene.

Chin has been attending the University of Oregon pursuing a degree in computer science since 2009. Now the undergraduate is forced to quit college to fill her husband's financial shoes

"I dropped out of school," Chin said. "Now every problem I must deal with by myself."

MAPLETON, Ore. - Jennifer Chamberlain knocks on the front door of the Mapleton Evangelical Church and calls out, "We're from the county and the state doing a preliminary damage assessment.

In the basement, church trustee Roger Gould was still mopping up the mess the flood left behind almost a month ago.

He's seen worse.

"The 1996 flood," said Gould, pointing to the level the water reached on the wall, "the water in the basement was up to this level."

Not that January weather took it easy on Mapleton.

"This flood, we had 74 inches and a half of water here in the basement," Gould said, "and 10 and a half inches in the sanctuary."

County and state officials are knocking on doors in nine counties with a damage assessment team from the Federal Emergency Management Association. FEMA officials were in Lane County on Thursday assessing the damage from last month's flooding.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oceanographers say it's not "if" but "when" debris from the March 2011 tsunami in Japan starts washing up along the Oregon Coast.

"We know when the stuff went into the ocean," said Jack Barth, an Oregon State University profressor, "and we know the ocean currents pretty well, so we can project that in a simulation projection of a cloud of debris to see when it arrives."

Barth said debris has already reached the Hawaiian Islands.

The West Coast can expect to see  wreckage later this year, especially buoyant objects sturdy enough to survive the journey.

"I think it's going to be building materials," Barth predicted of what will wash ashore. "The plastics seem to be able to float and stay around for a long time. It's that kind of stuff that I think will make it over.