Yesterday I arrived at work at 6am to board a bus with a handful of volunteers from my company. We headed to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where we were slated to help with the flood cleanup.
In mid-June, nearly 24,000 people were evacuated from their homes due to flooding. At times, in certain parts of Cedar Rapids, the Iowa River waters crested at nearly 31 feet. Because of the nature and the devastation of this flooding, many people could not return to their homes because of health concerns.
However, the real tragedy is that the people of Cedar Rapids are not helping their own. Instead of mobilizing and assisting their neighbors in need, they are simply ignoring the problems facing homeowners. Not to wish them evil, but how would six feet of water in THEIR house make them feel? And what would they do when FEMA doesn’t give them money to clean up THEIR houses?
The city has been relying on volunteers from out of state since the flood waters receded. In talking to many of the organizational members of the cleanup effort, time and time again I heard the same thing.
“Thank you for traveling such a long distance to help out complete strangers.”
I have to be honest. I didn’t know much about the situation before we arrived in Iowa. My ignorance is my own damn fault, and I’ll own that. But after arriving on the scene and working with the other volunteers in Iowa, I’m aghast that a city that is so pristine on one side, is treating the affected areas like dirty step-children.
It is inexcusable.
For our tiny little drop-in-the-bucket part, myself and fifteen other volunteers worked on two homes. The first was a rental house that the landlord rented to a low-income family. The water hit 5 feet in this area. You can see it in the photos. I never did find out where they were living at the time, but when we arrived on the scene, the drywall had been cut at 5 feet, exposing the entire frame of the house on the first floor. Everything was gutted, and our job was to wash the studs with bleach water and then rinse with clean water.
It was dirty, sweaty, hot, smelly, and we were wearing long sleeves, jeans, boots, masks, and gloves in 80 degree weather. But after a few hours of washing and scrubbing, the house smelled better, and began to dry. The reconstruction could begin after our visit. A chat with the owner revealed that their loan from the government of $50,000 would barely cover the reconstruction costs.
And that was just one house.
We moved on to another home that was destined for demolition. But the health hazards associated with demolishing a molding house are high, so the internals needed to be gutted. When we first walked in, the scene was dismal.
The white paint on the walls was caked with dirt. In the kitchen, the sun was trying to shine through mud caked windows, but only a few rays spilled onto the saturated and browning rug. The sink, ringed with brown still had a fork and a dish in it, crusted with dirt. In the bathroom, a razor was on the edge of the sink, and a shampoo bottle was half-buried in sludge in the tub. The water was high in this area of the city, and the stairs down into the basement ended abruptly in a mass of muck. The bedroom carpeting looked pregnant, swollen because the wood floors underneath had warped and buckled upward from the trapped moisture.
I can’t imagine finding scene like that in my house. God only knows how awful these people felt.
Our job at this site was to rip out the trim, bust out the drywall, get rid of the carpeting, and basically strip as much as we could down to the frame. The interiors would be hauled away and disposed of. But this house was too far gone to save. Mold like this would never be controlled.
With sledge hammers, crobars, picks, wheelbarrows and hammers, we made our masked way in and destroyed as much as we could. I’d never done that kind of work before, but I soon realized that five minutes of work meant fifteen minutes of mess. Load after load was hauled out the front door in buckets, wheelbarrows, and by hand. This is a pile of some of what we got out.
Interestingly enough, the lead on this site told us that FEMA had sent so much money to Cedar Rapids, that they issued them a massive bill. Cedar Rapids actually OWES FEMA money. How’s that for a Federal kick when you’re down. The agreement with FEMA that the city currently has, states that for every hour of volunteer work, FEMA deducts $18 from the bill. So our crew of 16, at $18/hour, with six hours of work, paid back FEMA $1728. Our company sent more people along to do work, along with a $50,000 donation.
Those figures are drops in the bucket when you consider the entire populations along that river in the state that were hit hard. The take away from this experience is that I need to learn more about what is happening in my own back yard, and do some good locally. I can’t imagine having to depend on people from another state to help cleanup a local mess.
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