Waterloo, Iowa Disaster Recovery: Day 3 - Cedar Rapids "MUCK OUT".

We phoned Mary, the homeowner, to meet us at her home and give us some instructions on what she needs us to do. A crew from New York, 3 guys & 1 gal, met us there to help with mucking out. They are working with World Hope also.

Little did we know that Mary was at work when we called her, but she came to meet us and spent the entire day working along with us. Here's a picture of Mary chatting with Gary. Notice Gary's monkey suit around his ankles.

We had nominated our team member, Dave, and one of the guys from New York, James, as the ones to go to the basement. The door to this basement was an opening in the floor covered by a board with hinges. This is me standing on the stairs to the basement. They got me in the monkey suit and I was very grateful to have one for this job. If you look close, I have totes on too.

There was no electric, water, or a way to get light into this muddy, dark, storage filled space under the house. God Bless these brave souls for spending several hours grabbing soggy, muddy items they couldn't even see and handing them up to us to put out to the curb. Then to go back down there after that armed with shovels and 5 gallon buckets to shovel the mud up off the tile floor & hand those buckets up to us. We coined them as the "Muck Brothers". When that part of the mucking was over I gave them both a 5 min break. Now you know why Dave looked so relieved on his break as I snapped this photo.

Mary owned the house 2 doors away and part of our crew spent the day there tearing off drywall & lathe, ripping out cabinets, and clean out work. Mary's mother died last year & she needed to take care of that house as well. Mary lost everything in this flood. Here is a picture of a room inside her neighbors home to give you all an idea of what approx. 3,500 homeowners had to deal with after the flood.

At the end of the day it is amazing to look at the pile of debris that we removed from the home ... in this case 2 homes. Those big black blobs in the lower left of the photo below are some of the piles of mud that came out of the basement. I lost count after 32 buckets.