Week 15 - Dirtiest Job with Mike Rowe

Well, we're up to week 15, and thankfully we have managed to stay out of Lovell Canyon for a while longer. But instead, we were put on a 4/3 day rotation for two weeks because of a little disaster in a city called Fernley not far outside of Reno. Fernley is an agricultural city, and they have levees all over the place. A levee broke in a residential area and over 800 houses were flooded several feet. In a desperate attempt to curb the possibility of mold setting in, or even worse, the proliferation of nasty diseases, they had quite the number of volunteers ready to help clean up. Though Americorps is not a religiously affiliated group, we were sent to work with a Southern Baptist disaster relief team. Since most of them were older, we were sent to do the dirty work... cleaning out crawl spaces still slightly filled with water...
Sweet yellow suits (that liked to break regularly) kept us "mostly" dry. Thankfully most of the houses were like the above, stripped and not even remotely ready to be lived in. There were two houses that were fully furnished and being lived in, we had to be very careful there because we came out of most houses looking like the crap monster from Dogma.
That's actually me somewhere in there... Because of the face masks, I couldn't even wear my glasses under, no one really could. The tight spaces prevented us from wearing hardhats, and the gloves would get so completely trashed just after half the house that most of them were tossed regularly. We didn't really know what we were going to be doing when we got to Fernley, so we didn't exactly come prepared to be throwing away so much. Needless to say, the last day of work I was wearing two different size gloves, from somewhere I found in the truck that had been kind of not really washed out to decrease the amount of dirt on them...
The relief team set us up in the local S. Baptist church! We had heat, cots, food made for us, and showers! It was magnificent! Those are three of the trooper internationals we had with us. I say trooper because one of them is claustrophobic and still went under two of the houses and helped pull insulation out. Thoroughly impressed.
These are the marshmallow suits they had to get for us after we ran out of the yellow suits, which broke at the first move your made. That's me in the blue bandana, looking like the Michelin man, and we were ready to go under! It was our last house of the tour, and it was by far the worst. Though it didn't take as long as others, there were literally pools of water in certain areas with almost frozen water in all of them. Exhausted and ready for a shower, we hurried home after this house and it was only day 3 of our 4 day tour, we were out of houses!
To remedy this situation of being out of houses, we ended up working with Goodwill, sorting through all sorts of donations, preparing for families to take what they needed to start their world over. Not nearly as tiring, but a good bit easier and probably a little more fun, we left Fernley on Thursday afternoon and headed back to Reno, prepared for a weekend of fun!

Next week, Dayton Valley bank restabilization!