Dirty Dozen - Staten Island

The Hurricane Sandy relief trip was pretty crazy. Saturday morning we checked in with the All Hands coordinators and headed out to Staten Island. Out there on the main streets things look perfectly normal – stores are open and it’s all strip malls, restaurants, and car dealerships. But turn down a side street, go a couple hundred yards and the houses run the gamut from knocked-off-their-foundation condemned to nicely-coming-along rebuilding. A lot of people have been able to get their lives back together, (those with responsive insurance companies and able to hire good contractors) but a lot of people haven’t gotten anything since the day the hurricane swept in. Our mission was one of those. From the waterline mark on the front door it looked like the floodwaters came 3 feet up the second floor. The first floor was foot-deep in mud and muck, the second floor was all soaked furniture and mold. We shoveled and wheelbarrowed out the ooze and heaved out all the furniture and appliances, throwing everything into the dumpster at the curb. Somebody said there was still food in the fridge. From when the storm hit in October. Duct-taped that fridge door shut and treated it like a biohazard bomb, which it kinda was. House empty, we attacked the walls with sledge hammers and crowbars. It is exhilarating and exhausting and so, so, filthy. You’re pulling chunks of drywall down onto yourself so you’re constantly showered with dust and crud and fiberglass insulation, you’re wearing a dust mask and safety glasses but mask directs your breath up into the glasses so they fog up opaque with moisture and dust, so basically you have a choice to protect either your lungs or your eyes, but not both. But it’s rewarding to see continual and significant progress, the moldy drywall disappearing to wooden studs and insulation and then to the framing skeleton of the house, you see the place becoming more open and clean. And when you can get a nice big 4-foot sheet of drywall to peel clean away, or extract a six-foot length of rolled insulation whole from the airgap, it’s immensely satisfying, not unlike those times as a kid when you spread a layer of Elmer’s glue on your palm and let it dry then peel it away in a whole sheet. Yeah that’s fun.

I’m really glad we finished that house, I can’t imagine how traumatizing it would have been for the owners to try to do all that work by themselves, it would have taken months. I saw the guy out in the backyard breaking down what used to be an above-ground pool, seeing him alone in the middle of all this devastation and trash was heartbreaking. But when we were done, the place was empty and the mold and mildew smell was (mostly) gone and you could see the strong bones of the house, the trauma of devastation and loss is replaced with the promise of the home it could be again. I like to think that the owners stood there looking around at the space and said “we can make something good here”. I feel a little twinge of anxiety about what will happen when the next hurricane comes, like, I hope they rebuild the house up on stilts or something. But it’s not my place to think about their future, people need help now, and I’m glad we could be there.