Dirty Jobs
Sarge is a veteran of Afghanistan, his close cropped hair a bit of a contrast to his bushy moustache. He chain smokes Marlboro Reds and has a voice that sounds like he's been doing it a while. That voice has a steadiness as it gives us our assignments. We need to clean the house out. The flood's overwhelmed the basement and came up to five feet in the first floor, so everything inside is ruined. Start in the backyard, then work our way indoors. Family's been here and salvaged everything they can. Everything inside comes out and gets thrown in a dumpster, then we tear it down. Tear it down to the studs? Yes. To the studs.
I'd been through this before, in Mississippi, but the drill was familiar now, though some things were still new. I've never had to dispose of a fridge before, and it seems like neither has Sarge. We loaded the fridge onto a dolly without securing the doors, and so, as we shifted it, eggs, milk and raw meat that had been sitting inside for two weeks without power came spilling out. The stench is horrendous, but it could have been worse. There had been stories in Biloxi of whole cleaning crews being temporarily incapacitated by months old exploded fridges that had evolved into black mold bio bombs. Still, we gritted our teeth moved what we had, first to the door before realizing that the door was too narrow for the fridge, then straight out one of the living room windows. We let it go and watched this gleaming silver and black appliance tumble down to a rubbage pile that we were building at the base of a dumpster.
The phases of cleaning a flood damaged house starts with dumping everything that's been touched by the flood. You learn to harden a heart as you gather up the relics of someone's life and shovel it in to a garbage bag, trying not to project whatever sentiment they may have had for these things, which are just things. Water damaged pictures. A teddy bear. A My Cousin Vinny DVD. The family has been through before and said this wasn't salvageable to them, but sometimes one can't help but care.
It's muddy, smelly work. Sometimes, you use that to harden up. We have to get through this so that they can rebuild.
Then, we take hammers and crowbars to their fixtures. A wooden bedframe, mold spores already blossoming on its legs, collapses in three swings of a sledge. Sarge hands incarnadine_ich a five foot long metal pole with a sharp chisel at the end of it. It's basically a spear, and Sarge shows him how to wedge it in the small space where cabinets are fixed to the walls then lever the cabinets off. incarnadine_ich starts referring to it as Mr. Stabby, and the name sticks.
As incarnadine_ich dismantles the kitchen, I hold a hand up to him as he gets to the dishwasher, signalling a wait. I peek inside and see that it's still filled with glass and dishes, so I grab a roll of duct tape that we found in the debris and wrap it up, rolling the tape around a few times then using vice clamps to disconnect various hoses. There's still one cable that's hard to reach, so incarnadine_ich just impales it with Mr Stabby until it comes apart. As Sarge helps me carry the dishwasher over to throw it out the window, he looks at the duct tape job and simply says, "that's smart."
I just shrug and say, "picked it up in the Gulf. People there used to duct tape fridges before they were tossed, and I was getting tired of walking on broken glass."
"We didn't do too much of that in Haiti. Many of the folks we helped couldn't afford a fridge."
It's been seven years since I worked in Biloxi, but in that time, this outfit, once Hands-On USA, now All-Hands Volunteers, has gone on to do disaster relief in the wake of tornadoes, earthquakes and floods. Volunteers have been showing up in crews with old t-shirts with names of past projects: Haiti, Cedar Rapids, Peru, and in our breaks we'll swap war stories. The Philippines was hot, but the locals were lovely. Haiti was a shitshow. Where I remembered Biloxi being about a bunch of talented amateurs figuring stuff out as they went along, New York was turning into a bunch of us who had just leveled up.
At some point in midday, Sarge grabs me to go with him to grab lunch, and I sit shotgun in his truck as we roam over to a community center that's been converted into a makeshift supply depot where off-duty firemen are running a few grills. There are no veggie options but we grab some boxed cold cut sandwiches, and Sarge drives around a little further until he finds a functioning grocery with some pasta salad. Through it all, I'm looking out the window at houses that are missing walls, or shoved off their foundations. Some places look ok, until you stop and look deeper and see that the ceiling has collapsed inside. Everywhere, there are volunteers. Mormons, Red Cross, this church and that church. There is an abundance of helping hands but an even greater amount of work to be done.
same angle as above, one day later
We work through the afternoon, stripping drywall and insulation off, and come back on Sunday to finish the walls and tear the floors out. This time, around lunch, Sarge asks me to take someone with a vehicle and go get food so that he can stick around and keep the crew running. I take off with an electrician in a Red Sox sweatshirt, and he tells me stories of how his crew worked during Sandy, setting up and running emergency generators during the evacuation of New York Medical Center. "This stuff today isn't so bad," he says,"yeah, it's dirty and sweaty, but at least you aren't worried that someone might die if you don't do your job right."
Again, the community center doesn't have veggie options, but the electrician and I load up on burgers, sausages and more of the same Red Cross packaged cold cut sandwiches, then we walked back down one of the big commercial streets, towards a Salvation Army distribution point that we spied earlier. There's a small row of steam tables there, run by an Indian family, and, of course, they have lentil curries, saag paneer and biryani, and a steaming plate of curry is a tempting alternative to a slightly tepid hamburger patty.
incarnadine_ich, A and I take off shortly after lunch, so that we can get back to their loft in Brooklyn in time for me to hook up with my ride back to Boston. As we leave, Sarge looks up at me and asks, "so you said you're coming back next week?"
"Yeah. Coming down on Thanksgiving day and stick around 'til Sunday again."
"Well, you know we're not running any jobs on Thanksgiving. We need the downtime."
"That's no problem. I think I can find my own trouble. Maybe hook up with Occupy or the Red Cross or something. See you guys on Friday and Saturday at least."
"If you do, and if you're interested in leading a team, tell the coordinators. You know what's up and we need more leads to run more projects. We're currently capping volunteers because we don't have enough people here to supervise."
"Sure. That sounds good. See you next weekend maybe."