William Rettie, a Marine Corps veteran and his wife Tamera, who served in the National Guard, have been dealt a rough hand as of late. “It was just everything. One thing after another but we kept making it through with the grace of God,” Tamera said. When Hurricane Ian struck the Tampa Bay area, the storm and a fallen tree took part of their Ruskin mobile home with it. In the aftermath, the couple was living on their porch, with no usable water and barely a roof over their head. “We basically just stayed out on our covered patio, put up tent walls and just stayed there,” William explained. A neighbor called code enforcement, but when the officers arrived they realized they could find a way to help. “This report came in as an abandoned home, overgrown abandoned junk, trash and debris,” Christine Zien-McCombs, a Hillsborough County Code Enforcement and Community Outreach Officer, said. She’s also the founder and president of Operation Code Vet, an organization that helps veterans clean up and repair their homes, free of charge. “I started putting two and two together that these veterans were becoming homeless, because the property maintenance issues they couldn't keep up with,” Zien-McCombs explained. “They're on a fixed income trying to get by. And so I started noticing these veterans were coming into court, and a lot of these veterans were coming in disabled, and they're being stressed out. And I thought, and we got to figure something out,” she added. Since 2017, they’ve been helping local vets stay off the streets, and now they are taking their efforts one step further, with help from the Gramática Family Foundation and Habitat for Humanity. MORE: https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/hillsboroughcounty/veteran-code-enforcement/67-c4507a96-cbc9-48df-95b0-f4e287875e5c ►Subscribe: https://on.wtsp.com/youtube ►Website: https://www.wtsp.com/ ►Facebook: https://facebook.com/10TampaBay ►X: https://twitter.com/10TampaBay