“Teamsters
care. It’s in our DNA,” said Jim Hoffa, Teamsters General President, after
reports of Teamsters loading trucks with relief supplies, delivering them to
staging areas, working with the Red Cross and other groups, and doing a lot of
the heavy lifting that comes with rescue and recovery efforts after a natural
disaster of that magnitude.
After the
storm, Teamsters in the stricken areas worked long hours in horrific conditions
to get storm-struck areas back to normal—or at least a semblance of normal. But
Teamsters who weren’t close enough to physically help still dug deep and
donated to the Teamsters Disaster Relief Fundto help out those
Teamsters who had to rebuild themselves.
A couple of
months ago, relief checks from the Teamsters Union made their way into the
hands of Teamsters whose property was severely damaged.
It was ugly outside on the day Mike Klein got his check from the
Teamsters Disaster Relief Fund. “It was raining, I was upset, but getting that
help from the Teamsters Union brought some light into my day,” said Klein, a
Local 831 Teamster who works for New York City’s Department of Sanitation.
Klein is one of many Teamsters who, despite being affected by the hurricane
personally, worked through the deadly aftermath.
“We live in an evacuation zone and knew an evacuation order was
coming. A year earlier, during Hurricane Irene, we were also ordered to evacuate,”
said Klein, who lives on Long Island and works in the Bronx. “We rode out Irene
at home. My wife didn’t want to leave the house. It wasn’t that bad. We had a
little damage…lost some shingles but we didn’t lose power. We thought it would
be the same this time.”
But it wasn’t. Hurricane Sandy turned out to be one of the
deadliest and most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history. It was the
second-costliest hurricane in American history after Hurricane Katrina. It cost
tens of billions of dollars in damage, destroyed thousands of homes, left
millions without power and caused dozens of deaths, including some Teamster
members and their families.
“We’re on the water, on the bay side. We were completely
destroyed. We were allowed to go back in and then directly out a week or so
later to get our belongings. We couldn’t stay there, though. We had to go back
and forth, back and forth to get our things. The place was in bad shape. Our
foundation was destroyed. Engineers said we had to get it redone. A lot of things
have to be redone—all the plumbing and electric, for example.” It took months
before he and his family could get back into their home, incurring many
expenses along the way.
“When we got back in, obviously we hadn’t had a chance to repair
much yet. The insurance money hadn’t come through yet. We did what we could
just to be in the house…to have a roof over our heads,” Klein said. “It’s hard
to describe to people what it was like to watch the houses on either side of me
get ripped apart.”
Normalcy has since returned to his life thanks, in part, to the Teamsters
Disaster Relief Fund.
“When I came home from work with the check from the Teamsters,
it brought my wife to tears,” Klein said.
“You don’t know what that relief fund has meant to our members.
We have sanitation workers that live and work in New York City and our claims
were really high,” said Harry Nespoli, President of Local 831 in New York City,
which represents sanitation workers. “I went out to Rockaway, Coney Island,
Staten Island—all the hardest-hit areas. It was devastating. Many of our men
were there working in the neighborhoods with their own homes wiped out. They
were living and sleeping in the garages. They worked 12-hour shifts. We had
guys that took the trucks out on their own time and worked for nothing, just to
help.”
Joey Manuel was one of those workers who went right into work
directly after the storm despite the trauma of losing his own home.
“This whole experience has really changed my life,” said Manuel,
a steward and clerk with the New York City Sanitation Department. “After an
experience like this, you see how fragile life can be. It’s there at one point
and it could be gone the next.”
Manuel was watching football on TV when he noticed water rising
outside of his house. There wasn’t much at first…just a sidewalk underwater.
It’s didn’t take long for it to get worse.
“Sure enough the whole corner of my block is soon
underwater…within half an hour, me and my mother were paddling through it. We
didn’t realize the whole basement had been filling up underneath us. It has an
8-foot ceiling and it filled up then started coming in the rest of the house,” he
said. “I told my mom that we had to get out so we got in the car, which was
ankle deep in water in the back yard by then. By then the whole neighborhood
was full of water. The car got submerged while we were in there with all of our
personal belongings that we were trying to take with us. We had to get out
because water was coming into the car. I open the door, water rushes in. I get
out, get my mom out and bring her back to the house. We go up to the top floor
and stay there.”
Through it all, Manuel and his mom were dodging boats floating
down their street, power lines coming down and other hazards. In the end, his
home was almost completely destroyed, but he still went to work that day.
“I was a zombie,” he said, but he realized there were people—his
neighbors, friends and family—that still needed help. So he got to work, like
hundreds of other Teamsters. Manuel recently got his check from the Teamsters
Disaster Relief Fund.
Teamster magazine wrote about the
union’s reaction to the storm in the Winter 2013 edition and had this to say about the
city’s sanitation workers:
New York sanitation workers, members of
New York City’s Local 831, quickly became the most popular people in
storm-ravaged neighborhoods. Even President Barack Obama referred to their hard
work, mentioning the sanitation workers “who sometimes don’t get credit but
have done heroic work.”
Those Teamster sanitation workers
cleared more than 300,000 tons of debris from neighborhoods after the storm.
The Staten Island Advance newspaper reported,“The Sanitation workers arrive
like heroes in Staten Island’s devastation zone…New York City’s Strongest are
showing up in force—with bulldozers, dumpsters, and hundreds of workers on duty
at a time, clad in gloves and dust masks, doing the back-breaking work of
cleaning up, neighborhood by neighborhood, in the hardest-hit zones.”
“We really appreciate everything from the Teamsters. It really
helps,” Manuel said.
“Getting
that check with the Teamster name on there made them feel good. The checks went
to buying groceries, some are still making repairs on their homes,” Nespoli
said. “It’s not so much the money, though. It’s that people care. New York had
never been hit anything like this before and it was good to see other people,
our Teamster brothers and sisters, reach out and help. I was really proud of
the Teamsters on this particular front. It meant a lot.”
