Water gun Saturday

On Saturday, I particpated with Rupert, a really great guy from Tokyo who refers to his boots as “Wellies.”

The group of HANDS participants was especially large on Saturday for two reasons:

One, there was going to be an enormous, epic all HANDs participants party that night and it’s kind of natural to do the volunteer work before going to the epic party,

and

Two, because the party was anticipated to be so epic, the party organizers had arranged a HANDs holiday, a day off, for our three staff members. This means that there was no volunteering on Sunday, so anybody who wanted to participate on the weekend through HANDS had to do it on Saturday.

(This does not happen often, by the way. We’re still dispatching every day.)

It was such a big group that we used both vans for transportation, plus two participants drove their own cars and took passengers to boot.

When we got there, we were split up into two groups. One was tasked with handing out donations, mostly winter supplies, at the big Kannon statue. About six people from our group, though, were to split off and do a different job—using the pressure cleaner, aka 高圧洗浄、aka “big crazy water gun,” to clean a barber shop on the main street with all the shops.

Rupert and I ended up working in the big crazy water gun group.

It was the last day of what must have been a multiple day job; the sheet said to remove rubble from the shop but that had already been done by another team. What was left was washing off the salt and mud from the shop with the water gun. The walls and ceiling had already been removed so the only thing that was left of the structure was the iron beams plus some wooden beams, and an iron ceiling.

Tsunami water and mud is nasty stuff. It doesn’t stink, per se, but it doesn’t smell nice. From a building perspective, for one thing, it’s salty, and salt means rust.

I once met a resident who said her family’s car had only floated a bit in the tsunami and been dented. They thought “Lucky! We still have the car.” But after they drove the car for a while, it performed worse and worse, until they finally had to take it to a mechanic. The mechanic told them it was the sea water, and there was nothing they could do. They could drive it for now but at some point the car was going to be junk.

On a side note, that same family had a bunch of belongings still intact in their house as well, but because that neighborhood didn’t get power or water for months and months, by the time they got the chance to come back and clean and salvage things everything had been ruined by mold.

Anyway, so one reason to wash off a building is rust, but another is the smell. You have to get rid of all the mud because if you don’t, it’s going to start smelling. It’s a process with really a lot of steps—take out the big rubble, shovel the mud off the floor, take down the walls and ceiling (it’s rotting by now), hose down the building and scrub the beams, remove the remaining mud. After volunteers come in and finish the washing stage, there’s actually another step where you have to disinfect everything or a lot of nasty tsunami bacteria is going to grow and the place will start to smell. I don’t know what happens after that.

So after one person had washed off the whole shop with the water gun, everyone got ladders and brushes and started scrubbing the beams. I think this is both to get rid of the mud that the water gun didn’t get, and to get the remaining salt off the beams, but don’t quote me on that last part because I’m not sure.

I’m up there scrubbity scrubbing away and reach to clean the top of the beams, and when I pull my hand back I find—

an enormous gob of mud that is still stuck up there on the top of the beam.

The people using the water gun were using it from the ground, which is really about all you can do, but when you do it from the ground the tops of beams and nooks and crannies up there in the ceiling don’t get water shot at it directly. Therefore, we had to use the ladders to get all that mud off by hand. By the time I was done for the day, I was covered in mud because I couldn’t figure out any way to get the mud off that

didn’t involve flicking it towards myself.

My jeans will never forgive me, and my beloved volunteer hat looks like it’s been attacked by a mud puddle.

The owner of the barber shop was very nice. At the end, some of the guys moved a big barber chair back into the shop. The tsunami came up to the third floor of his building, so the owner still isn’t done with cleaning, nor with rebuilding his shop.

In other news, I found out Saturday night that it’s very rare for homeowners and business owners to have insurance, like disaster insurance. According to my leader, Futo-san, the only money these people are likely to get is from the prefecture. I had been assuming that everyone was getting a big payout from their insurance to rebuild.