One Brick New Orleans Trip

GUTTING the Mental Health Clinic.

We arrived at the clinic and yeah... do we need to remind ourselves it's been over 2 years? yes, we do. it has been over 2 years and 2 of the buildings in the complex had not been touched. the third one was almost completely cleared.

2 effing years!

So before any work could commence we had to suit up in haz-mat bunny suits. and gloves, and masks or respirators (for those who managed to find cartridges), hard hats and goggles, and rubber boots.

A group set to working in the almost cleared building, the rest of us sorta ambled towards the untouched, unopened for 2+ years mental health center. A bunch of very determined guys set to working on prying the front door opened. it took them maybe half an hour. the rest of us started working on one of the side entrances.

Imagine a building that got flooded to the rafters 2 years ago (Aug 29, 2005, to be precise). A clinic. Imagine the water receding after 3 or 4 weeks. Imagine the building sitting there untouched until 4 days ago. Also imagine some of the windows were broken and rain water has continued to get inside since. I don't think i can describe what we saw. I can't do it justice, I'm just not eloquent enough to paint the picture of what we had to deal with: 4 inches of still wet mud (it had rained the previous week) covering the floor. Sticky-smelly-wet-slimy-slippery mud.
Then there were the walls. you think you know mold? let me tell you about mold. you don't know sh*t about mold. You don't know the smell of it. You don't know the look of it. You don't know sh*t about it. And you don't want to. Really, you don't.

Do you know what happens to a building when it gets flooded to the rafters? think about it for a moment. What do you think happens to the wood furniture inside a room when the room is filled with water? you got it, it floats, and it gets shuffled and then as the water recedes, the furniture just floats down and it lands where it may. Now, what do you think happens to paper? to chair cushions? to carpet? to computers? telephones? filing cabinets? light fixtures? what do you think happens to drywall and insulation?

There's no way to describe the smell.

There's no way to describe the how dirty you feel. this is bad filth. saw dust? dry wall dust? soil? they're all CLEAN dirty. Gutting dirty is not the kind of clean, healthy, dirty you've experienced.

First order of business: get the mud off the floor. Second: get big objects off the rooms, in one piece if they will fit through the door, in many pieces if they won't. Third: take down the drywall and insulation.

Now try doing it all without fully functioning wheelbarrows. One team got creative and used wheeled garbage and recycling cans to cart off the crap. At lunch there was an uprising among the ranks: we need wheelbarrows. So a collection was taken and off to home depot we go. If anyone were to take a poll among those of us there that day, we'd all agree that the $200 or so spent on 3 brand new, top of the line wheelbarrows was money well spent.

Did I mention bunny suits? did I mention it was a warmish day? What do you think happens when one engages in physical labor inside a plastic suit on a warm day? 'nuff said.
At the end of the day we had 2 enormous piles of stuff we took off the buildings. And we barely made a dent.