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After storms and different local weather disasters, legions of staff seem in a single day to cowl blown-out buildings with building tarps, rip out ruined partitions and flooring, and begin placing cities again collectively. They are largely migrants, are predominantly undocumented, and lack fundamental protections for building work. Their efforts are vital in an period of rising climate-related disasters, however the staff are topic to hazards together with accidents, wage theft, and deportation. “Right now, there is a base camp for the National Guard; FEMA officials in Louisiana are staying in hotels,” Saket Soni, the founder of the nonprofit group Resilience Force, tells Sarah Stillman. “But the workers who are doing the rebuilding with their hands are sleeping under their cars to protect themselves from rain.” Stillman travelled to Louisiana, to the car parking zone of a Home Depot, to report on Soni’s effort to arrange and win recognition for these laborers as a definite workforce performing important work. “These years ahead,” Stillman notes, “are going to bring more brutal hurricanes, more awful floods, more terrifying wildfires and heatwaves—more than any of us is really prepared to handle. . . . And what’s at stake is not just these workers’ fates but also our collective shared survival.”
