LINDON — Matthew Blackburn, a builder by trade, spent a week last month unbuilding houses. He worked 12-hour days in 90-degree temperatures, stripping Sheetrock off walls, dismantling ceilings, ripping up floorboards, until about the only thing left was the framing, the roof and the foundation.
And he can’t stop talking about how it was one of the choice experiences of his life.
Hurricane Harvey really did a number on him.
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Twelve years ago, Blackburn watched on television as Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans. The appalling devastation was only made worse by the high level of complaining about the lack of help from the government.
“I remember being frustrated with that,” said Blackburn. “My feeling was that we, as people, can pitch in and take care of things without having to leave everything up to the government.”
He held onto that thought, and when Harvey hit Houston last month — the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since that summer of Katrina — he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
Help.
Fortunately, Matthew was in a position where he could pull that off. He works for a Lindon-based company, appropriately called Response Marketing, that is owned by a boss, Ryan Poelman, with a heart equally humane.
When Matthew came to work on Tuesday, Sept. 5, less than 48 hours since it stopped raining in Houston, he asked to speak to Ryan. Their conversation went like this:
Matthew: I’d like to go to Houston and help the relief effort, and I was wondering if the company would pay for it.
Ryan: OK.
On Wednesday and Thursday, Matthew commandeered the company trailer, a 20-footer, and turned it into Home Depot on wheels, filling it with tools, generators, pumps, Tyvek suits, protective masks and other hazardous clothing, and plugging the remaining gaps with all the food, water and diapers that could be crammed in.
On Friday, Matthew hitched the trailer to his Ford F-350 pickup and got in the driver’s seat, joined by his friend and work colleague Jared Van Orden and two teenagers: Dodge Poelman (Ryan’s son) and Noah Anderberg (Ryan’s nephew). They settled in and asked Siri to get them to Houston.
Once there, they spent the next seven days immersed in a devastation that TV images couldn’t possibly do justice. They wound up in the Memorial area of Houston, where 30,000 homes had been flooded when two nearby reservoirs were purposely breached so the dams wouldn’t break. An area the size of Murray had been under 8 feet of water for days on end, until the water finally receded.
The only way to save the houses was to gut them and let the frames dry out. If the mold was allowed to spread, everything was doomed.
The men from Utah were among the first into the area. They parked their trailer and opened it up to anyone and everyone who needed tools, equipment and protective clothing. In no time, they were joined by a small army of volunteers just like them.
Matthew, Jared, Dodge and Noah put on their face masks and rarely took them off. They dismantled the insides of houses, piling up the debris in the front yard next to all the ruined furniture they also hauled out, including a soggy, $15,000 baby grand piano that Matthew tore apart with a chain saw.
In the process, they helped save the structural integrity of houses, including one belonging to Ms. Jewel, an 83-year-old woman they adopted as their Houston grandma.
They didn’t get them all.
"One hundred thirty thousand homes needed gutting," said Matthew. “We did six.”
When their week was up and they needed to get back to home, school and work, they gave away the few tools and equipment they had left, latched up the empty trailer and steered for Utah.
“I will always remember the feeling we left with,” said Matthew, explaining how good it felt to be worn out from giving people hope.
“You hear a lot of bad things about humanity,” he continued, “but to be down there, seeing good people help other good people, you couldn’t help but come away feeling pride. I honestly feel I came back a better person.”
He estimates the final tally for their mercy trip was $25,000-plus.
“I’m so lucky to work for an owner who sent us off and gave us full rein to do what we needed to do,” Matthew said. “The only thing he ever asked was, ‘How can we help?’”