Oct 4
"We started going door to door and kind of collecting as many volunteers as we could, especially who seemed like maybe they maybe had a little know-how with construction or something that would make them feel a little more at home and not completely a fish out of water in a disaster zone, and started talking to homeowners about what they needed to do to clean up and why for health reasons and for the integrity of their building and things like that."
Sep 25
"When [canvasers] identified medical needs or homebound folks, they would give us a call and we would provide our own care to go climb the stairs and make house calls to folks. Checking on someone or going around making prescriptions. We evacuated some people to the hospital if people needed to go. The main concern when we got here was 'were people dying on the up on the 20th floor because there’s no one checking on them and they can’t get down?'"
"A lot of the homes were really like disaster zones and there was no one doing any kind of site safety checks and so the first thing we tried to do was go into homes before random volunteers went into them so that we could just make sure there were no oil spills, there was no natural gas fumes, there were no serious hazards beyond what you would normally see with water damage and just kind of build a relationship with the homeowner so that they weren’t in a situation where somebody came in and did half the job but then the volunteers weren’t coming back the next day and so leaving them hanging – like there was a system and we very quickly started keeping track of who we were working for, what they needed, what the sites were like, if there were any hazards, if the stairs were broken, you know. And then we noticed that nobody knew what to do about mold. We knew that mold was going to grow. We knew that we couldn’t use bleach to get rid of it. We knew people who had done that kind of work after Katrina and we knew what needed to happen. And so, that became our focus right away just because that’s actually a really serious public health issue and, you know, can really degrade the structural integrity of a home."
Aug 17
"It took two weeks for full earnest visibility from the government. The trailers started showing up and you saw FEMA in a larger way. They trickled in for sure but their ambitions and their plug into the community was not where I expected them to be. And their nimbleness is clearly not at all possible. So I would say in two weeks we finally saw some support where the first two weeks we were really battling it out as a team of volunteers. And some of the liaisons through the government were really real major government institutional support. What you also saw were people coming out of the woodwork with things that were very important. Like somebody in the community owned a warehouse near the neighborhood, instantly everyone got that information and sent everything that was coming in to that warehouse. So that became a warehouse station, the distribution spots, the churches started coming online as distribution sites happily. And so those things were all in place with volunteers and private help which is a great feeling but it wasn’t a great feeling when two weeks later the ambulances finally show up to the public housing. And we had already created a popup medical clinic in one of our locations that were servicing 200 plus home bound senior citizens and non senior citizens but mostly senior citizens. And we were doing this all within our own means."
Aug 6
"We want to work with the same homeowners through the whole process as far as we can go. And right now, it takes us as far as pumping a basement, mucking it out, which is removal of furniture and soggy personal items, gutting demolition, which is removal of building components, and then mold removal, which is scrubbing out mold. And we are rebuilding in some cases. But we really don't have the funds or the capacity to do that right now. And going over our numbers, we have worked with the same homeowners through a lot of these jobs. We formed pretty good relationships with these homeowners. One thing I've noticed is people get kind of sick of all these different people coming through and, you know, taking data, then they never hear anything back from them. We all just wanted to avoid that because it's annoying."
Jul 24
" It felt really kind of there was this huge potential for change that I hadn’t felt since Occupy Wall Street so it was exciting as much as it was overwhelming and really sad and difficult. It was just like this could be our moment to really change the dialogue in New York around issues of climate justice and affordable housing and public housing and all of these different things that I’ve been thinking about and my friends have been thinking about for years but now it’s like on everyone’s mind how inadequate NYCHA is, how inadequate our utilities are, all these things. So it was a big moment in that way also."
Jul 24
" I can’t see any problems. I mean, you have to find people who lives on the first floor. Because that’s what they have really problems, you know because my gentleman he lives on the 6th floor and the lady lives on the-- I don’t, she lives on the second floor. They didn’t suffer a lot. But her friend, she’s 91 or 92 she lives on the first floor, she was flooded, I don’t know how she didn’t have powder dust, you know."
Jul 24
"When I first started, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks. Now it's more feeling it's going to be over a year at least. I'd like to see people getting back into their houses feeling more comfortable coming and getting the services that we're offering. But the numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And that's kind of eye opening...we are not back to normal and everyone thinks we are. They think that the storm is past and the damage should be over. And there's houses in this community that haven't even been touched yet. And there's, you know, people just starting the cleaning process. And it's six months later, so now they're tackling mold and mildew and a lot of other issues that we didn't think existed prior."
Jul 24
"Because I learned from my mother to make the light with olive oil and water, the transformers were going boom, boom, boom. My granddaughter said to me, grandma, grandma put your bathing suit on, put your bathing suit on. She said we’re gonna go swimming grandma -- I said I am praying, I am praying. You know and then I applied for FEMA and they said because I have high blood pressure and I have -- I was diagnosed with -- I was in the hospital I was going crazy, I don’t have no -- I didn’t have no medication I couldn’t do anything."
Jul 24
"One of the things we've been starting to explore is helping to develop worker cooperatives because there are so many unemployed people with skills ... I'm really excited about the opportunity to give- to create jobs for people, to create a livelihood that doesn't involve the existing system and doesn't involve people being exploited by people, people making opportunities for themselves."
Superstorm Research Lab 