October 5, 2017

Today’s project was a (very) large single story house that backed up to the Bayou. Need I say more? This family, (mom, dad & 2 kids), was gone when the storm hit, and when they finally returned, they found the house under 4 feet of water. By the time the water receded, the flooring had heaved up 4-6 inches making it impossible to open any of the doors. The dad described peering through the windows feeling totally locked out. The good news is that they have flood insurance which should help, hopefully a lot.

I learned today that if homeowners contract with paid providers to muck & gut their homes, it can often cost $7,500 to $12,000 – and they refuse to sort or pack personal possessions which is often the help the elderly need most. The volunteer teams do it all. Today’s home was empty – they’d already dealt with the contents (likely a total loss?) before we arrived. We arrived TWENTY strong today – Nechama, an Americorps team from Louisiana, and a team from Orthodox Christian Disaster Response. We divided up into groups of 4, and each took a room. I can now add the skill of “carpet pulling” to my deconstruction (we try to avoid saying demolition) resume. It was soaked, nasty, and we were happy to show it to the curb. Along with everything else you can see in the attached pictures.

This house was far “wetter” than the prior homes I’ve worked, and the wall board crumbled to nothing as we tried to pull it down. Up til now, we’d pulled the wallboard to 4 feet, but, here we pulled 8-10 feet up, and in some cases to the vaulted ceilings. I have discovered that I LOVE using a manual pry-bar! Oh, for the squeamish among you – skip these next sentences….. The bugs and cockroaches had moved in and taken up residence. And yes, they crawled across our shoes, and worse…. UGH.

We disconnect most electrical and all water in the houses while we work – so, there are no bathrooms and besides the toilets are typically yanked anyway. This sets up an interesting paradox as we are urged to drink water, but, have no facilities to use. After lunch, we did take the vans to a local grocery store and all trooped in, trying (yeah right) to be inconspicuous while we luxuriated in the only air conditioning we’d experienced all day.

I’d expected the work to be reasonably social, but, it really isn’t. You definitely cooperate, since many of the tasks take several sets of hands, but, there’s little if any small talk while you work – and everyone’s masked up, which doesn’t help. While help is readily available, there’s almost no supervision. Deconstruction consists of 10 different tasks (at the very most) executed repetitively, and everyone moves between them with virtually no hierarchy. (Is hacking down wall-board better or worse than carting out debris?) The only exception is that power tools are handled by people with experience. Though they did hand me a power screw driver today, so I could pull screws. I found it totally un-fun to use, and went back to my manual pry-bar at the earliest opportunity.

If it is possible, we were dirtier today, than we were last week. And so, once again, at the end of the day, (after allowing time for the Volunteer vans to depart!), I stripped out of my dirty clothes before driving back. At some point I may need one or more of you on this email to post bail, so please stay tuned.

I have not become a Houston Astro fan, (oh, our poor hapless Mariners), but, I am happy to celebrate their win today, cheer them on in the series against Boston, and root for them in their hunt for a Series win! Go Astros!

Looks like I will be extending my stay in Houston into early November, (with a quick trip back to Seattle to collect my mail at the end of next week…) I’ll share those details next week when I know more, but, as a sneak preview, it appears to involve creating a furniture distribution program for Houston JFS, and our clients who have experienced total loss. And for those of you who KNOW that I lack decorating taste of any kind, I can assure you that I am NOT going to be in charge of selecting the stuff, just working through the operations and logistics of the program. But, will they let me use a pry-bar?!

I love hearing from all of you! And miss you!