Flood SWAT and Hospitals

This week has been a muddy one for me.  I have spent the past three days and today cleaning out toxic mud from buildings. 

The past three days, I was on the Hopital Saint Croix (the Episcopalian hospital that just reopened recently after 4 or 5 years of being closed).  We cleaned the entire first floor of the hospital - one wing a day.  It was actually very frustrating, because we had to clear out all sorts of materials and surgical tools and ended up trashing thousands of dollars worth of medical materials.  We also had to move large medical equipment in order to clean.  Most of the machines will probably be trashed as well (they likely don't work any more after having sat in 6-8 inches of flood water and mud).  The saddest part is that none of these items were even being used.  They were all shoved in some back rooms that are not in use and left on the floor. 

Even with some major advanced notice that the hurricane was coming and with past experience of flooding (apparently the hospital floods every time a hurricane or major rainstorm comes), the hospital did nothing to prepare - they didn't put sandbags down to try and keep the flood waters out and they didn't pick things up off the floor.  Even doing just one of those two things would have saved thousands of dollars and hours of work.  It also would have meant that the hospital would not have had to be closed for so long.  If the storm had been worse, the hospital being closed would have been disastrous.  We are hoping to convince the hospital administration to use a disaster preparedness plan that we will put together for them (sandbags will go a long way), but we will have to wait and see if it is received at all.

Today I am on the flood SWAT team.  We are going around the neighborhoods that were affected the most by the floods and are cleaning out homes of the mud.  The mud is toxic.  There is human and animal waste and who knows what else in the muck and people are walking and living in it.  We have a ton of procedures in place to clean ourselves when we get back to base to keep us clean and to keep any nastiness from getting into the base.  These precautions are also to help prevent cholera (there have been some suspected cases in Leogane since the hurricane and flooding).  We bleach everything. :)  That includes ourselves - we have shower stalls set up where we shower with bleach water before going into base.  I will likely burn my clothes or leave them here for other volunteers to use...although I haven't yet decided what I will do with my boots (they're nice boots). :)

It is really great to be able to help out right away.  We were able to get the hospital open and are lending a hand to community members who are unable to clean out their houses completely for one reason or another.  Today we cleared out a 6 room house where there were two women and some kids - one older lady and a pregnant woman.  There is no way that they would have been able to get out all of the mud in their house - it was ankle deep and the entire house is surrounded by ankle deep mud as well.  It looks as though they were right in the main flow of the mud and flooding.


While it has been great working on the mud teams, I think that I will switch tomorrow.  I want to change things up and take a break from exposing myself to the toxic mud.  I might do rubbling, or I might do something a bit less physical...we shall see.  Just to reassure everyone, I am healthy (no sickness at all yet - fingers crossed) and well and am loving every moment down here.  I'm already trying to figure out how I can get back down here...