After weeks of meetings, creating documents and shaking hands, we’re doing what we set out to do. In the last two days, Richard Scott and Michael Craddock cleared seven storm decimated properties using a donated John Deer 200c track excavator with a thumb. Around HQ, Richard said, “It’s the beginning of the end.” He paused, then elaborated, “of the clean up phase, and the beginning of the beginning of the rebuilding phase.”
Michael described his job role as having his operator’s back, and being an extra set of eyes for him. He also directed traffic, talked with homeowners and managed spectators. “We’ve had two property owners show up. That guy John was absolutely wonderful. He went and took my dog for a walk. It’s a little bit stressful because some people aren’t used to working around machinery. Certain precautions might slip their mind, so you need to nicely remind them.”
John’s house was on at least four of his neighbors’ properties. A blue house from across the street had floated onto his block.
According to Michael, “taking that blue house down was easy peasy, it was a prefab house. Only took an hour to take it down and move it to the curb.”
But what happened in the weeks leading up to that hour?
Borough Hall is a bustling place. When you walk in, there’s a table with food on your left, a table for volunteer sign ups in front of you, and seniors meeting room turned distribution center to your right. Jennifer Maier, the borough administrator’s office is tucked away next to the distribution center. The whole lobby is filled with people, here for a free meal, to sign up for a volunteer shift, to pick up diapers for their children and cans of food, and to sign up with Jennifer for something odd – free demolition of storm destroyed homes. When Jennifer isn’t rushing from meeting to meeting, she always has a line outside her door. Jennifer has been working seven days a week since the storm hit Union Beach on October 29th, but she always has the patience to listen to the concerns of displaced homeowners. And this is only a fraction of what she does.
After creating a spreadsheet and google map of the 50+ properties signed up for demolition, Brenda Zimmerman and Jovia Nierenberg used some good old fashioned shoe leather to survey the most decimated parts of town. We needed notes on the structural damage and pictures of all four sides of every building in the area, signed up and not. Blue skies overhead graced the first day of surveying, but the second was cold and windy with dark storm clouds approaching. The streets were devoid of other pedestrians. According to Jovia “Hearing what’s left of buildings creak in the wind was pretty eerie. There were a few that I didn’t get pictures of the back of, because I didn’t want them to collapse on me in a sudden gust of wind.”
Meeting the homeowners and hearing their stories was both gratifying and heartwrenching. According to Brenda, “Conversations aren’t always easy, but it’s nice to have conversations and offer them an alternative.” Some blocks could be surveyed in half an hour, but others took half a day. It all depended on the extent of the damage and the number of people they stopped to talk with. One of the most touching things encountered on this journey was a single mother and her ten year old daughter coming back to their debris filled block with a large bag of cat food, to feed all of the displaced cats.
The data was color coded and put on a Google map. Seeing whole blocks colored red and yellow for having obvious structural damage gets the message about the severity of the destruction across a whole lot better than a long spreadsheet of addresses to scroll through. Whole neighborhoods are gone, but the BWB team is proud to be part of rebuilding them even stronger.
Compared to the last few weeks of meetings and paperwork, Richard describes his work in the last two days as “a breath of fresh… salvaged debris.”
