Day 4 - Mucking?!?

I asked a fellow volunteer to drive me to the Winn-Dixie in the morning because I had been doing two days of work without using work gloves. I decided safety was important enough, especially if I was going to work at either of the two open assignments we had scheduled today. The painting crew still had work to do but they didn't need anybody extra. If we went to the women's shelter again, I'd probably wind up helping to hang drywall, and at the newest assignment there was drywall hanging to do there also.

So I wanted to protect my fingers from hammer blows and cuts from hand saws or utility knives. So I was surprised when we were told that there was a house that needed mucking done. I wound up in the mucking crew with one other person from our Ohio group. She and I would help a crew from California clean the house. After the other groups were dropped off, we got dropped off with the Californians (who were Vietnamese immigrants) in front of the house. The grass had been stripped away, and when I went inside to inspect the house, it was partly gutted also. It looked like the crew that had been here before had taken away most of the furniture and then knocked out the walls.

But the floor hadn't been cleared off, and it was loaded with debris and fragments of drywall and other muck. We started cleaning up and then got rained on. The debris turned out to include sand and old oil. That meant that this was one of the houses where oil from a nearby refinery had leaked in. It finally hit me: sand or gravel and oil make asphalt. The floor was like pavement in some places because of that mix of sand and oil.

We met firemen from the house next door, where they were off-duty and still at work helping a fellow fireman with his roof. They gave us their leftover donuts and we all came out to meet them. We also met the Buddhist priest who came with the crew from California. Later in the day, as the pile of debris outside got taller and taller, a removal crew pulled up out front with a dump truck, a backhoe, and a bobcat. A few minutes later, the debris pile we had built up was gone.

The other house next door hadn't been touched since Hurricane Katrina. The day was a mix of signs of progress with signs that there's still a lot of work to be done.

When we got back to the trailers and got cleaned up, we found out that the California crew had sent somebody back to prepare Vietnamese food for dinner. They had made enough for all of us Ohioans too! The food was delicious, but there turned out to be too much of it for all of us!