After the storm: the hands of rebuilding
Chaos and debris were everywhere you could see on the streets on October 26, the day after hurricane Otis hit Acapulco. Tons of construction materials were laying on the roads; huge, shattered high-rises, and remains of glasses and metal parts from buildings, combined with dead palm trees, were scattered all over the Costera Miguel Alemán, the main avenue that connects the east and west sides of the city.
According to the National Hurricane Center of the US, Otis was a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 165 mph, and it was also “the strongest hurricane in the Eastern Pacific to make landfall in the satellite era”.
Hours after the storm, the first worry for people in Acapulco was to find their loved ones because many people could not go back home the night before given the bad weather. Their second worry was to find water and food, because potable water sources were severely affected.
After a week, a third worry of the population in Acapulco was clear.
Numerous households required assistance in reconstructing their homes after the storm, as their roofs were carried away by the strong winds, and they had nothing to cover their heads. Many others needed to restore walls and windows. According to figures made public by the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, more than 250,000 homes needed to be rebuilt.
Devastation must be the most frequently used word to describe what happened in Acapulco that night of October 25, but for the survivors that was the past because now what they urgently needed was to move forward, and that meant to recover some of the “normality” they had before Otis.
A month after the hurricane, the Mexican president announced that the federal government will distribute money among families to rebuild their homes but declared that the efforts deployed will not be enough, so he asked the people to rebuild their houses by themselves.
“We couldn’t do that alone from the government or with construction companies. The reconstruction of 250,000 homes must be done with the participation of everyone, with a self-construction system that is nothing out of this world because all the homes in Mexico, most of the homes in Mexico (our homes) have been built by the members of the families”, said López Obrador.
Who is rebuilding after the storm?
After hearing the president’s message, I couldn’t help but remember a long piece I read some years ago on The New Yorker. The article was about the exploitation suffered by groups of Latino immigrant workers in the US that were hired by disaster-recovery firms with the promise of getting a steady job, but instead they only receive terrible working conditions, low wages, and some workers even ended up injured or dead.
The text, written by Sarah Stillman and published in November 2021, detailed how these immigrants received “job offers” from disaster-recovery brokers that hired them to clean cities affected by hurricanes and other “natural” disasters.
Stillman’s reporting includes shocking details about the deplorable conditions these workers faced (especially during the pandemic days). Their situation was desperate, so immigrant workers had to organize themselves with the help of a nonprofit called Resilience Force, to fight for their wages because some companies simply decided not to pay them.
“As the workers follow storms, the organization [Resilience Force] follows them, trying to fight wage theft, avert injury, and generally prevent the kinds of disasters-within-disasters that pervade the industry”, wrote Stillman. Finally, a group of workers got a victory against one of the companies that retained salaries from workers and that company was banned to do recovery-business.
Nonetheless, the most salient feature from these groups of workers in the United States and from the statement made by the Mexican president after hurricane Otis is that basically the working class is alone and helpless because everyone (government and society in general) assumes that working class people must do the harsh jobs no one else wants to do.
This means that not only the impacts of climate change will be worse for more low-income populations, but also that poor people must rebuild everything after a disaster in rich cities and countries and, additionally, rebuild their own homes if affected by the so called “natural disasters”.