Drainage

Franklin College
Franklin, IN

'Exhausted' does not even begin to describe how I feel right now. Let me explain. We are living at Franklin College in the small town by the same name, and running the Johnson County Volunteer Center out of one of the halls on campus. In the process, we have had to contend with an ever-changing command structure, local political drama, a power-grab by various local, state, and federal agencies, a constant flow of information that was shaky at best and completely wrong at worst, and difficulties with establishing lines of communication.

So let me begin by explaining exactly what my team does. We take requests from victims that need volunteer help to clean up from the flood damage. This could include removal of debris from basements, disposal of various waterlogged appliances, tearing-up of saturated drywall and floorboards, or simply cleaning the mud and muck out of a house. The local food bank and donation center also request volunteers to fill their staffing needs. Once we have these requests, we assign volunteers to complete them, and keep track of what tasks have been completed.

Sounds simple, right?

Not quite. Our first problem is finding enough volunteers to do the work that needs done; we have had difficulty trying to consolidate the various church groups, Scout troops, and individual volunteers and run them through our center, so that we can keep track of them and avoid sending people to complete jobs that have already been done. That particular problem is being solved slowly, as the word gets out that volunteers should come to us, rather than trying to do it themselves. The next problem is that the victims are rarely home due to the condition of their houses, and thus we are unable to send volunteers to the location. Disaster areas are prime targets for various types of unscrupulous fucks that would like nothing more than the chance to loot an unwatched house, so for liability reasons we don't send volunteers to houses unless there is somebody there to keep an eye on them and tell them what needs done. The third major problem that we tend to run into is transportation; due to lawsuit-averting Americorps rules, we cannot drive any other vehicles than our vans without signing a ton of waivers and such, and we cannot even drive our vans with less than three team members in them. This makes getting people from one place to another a MAJOR hassle.

And that's just the job as it is written. In reality, my team does FAR more than that on a daily basis. We have unloaded at least fifteen semi-trailers full of food, water, appliances, clothing, and other household goods. Some of my teammates spent a couple hours in a muddy crawlspace underneath a house, cleaning out saturated insulation. I and several others drove a couple van-loads of water to an isolated trailer park (I shall tell the story of Friendly Village in a later post). I have spent HOURS on the phone over the last couple days (with various victims, volunteers, the Red Cross, FEMA, the Indianapolis Council on Aging, ACCESS Transit, a large number of church groups, a Boy Scout troop leader, a couple of VERY nice older people who were stuck in a shitty motel with nowhere to go, at least two people who chewed me out for, I suppose, being unlucky enough to be the one to answer the phone, and fuck knows what else) in an attempt to establish lines of communication and get at least something done...with varying degrees of success. My phone bill is going to SUCK; for about three days, my personal cellphone was one of the two contact numbers for the entire center.

To add to the list of interesting things that happened to me since arriving here, I strained (read as: fucked up REAL good) my back hauling heavy-ass things off a truck, and thus am in pain whenever I try to do simple things such as, say, walking. Awesome.

Oddly enough, though, despite the fact that I have been running off of caffeine and momentum for the last couple days, I kinda like it...and no, I'm not a masochist. Why do you ask?

Oh.