The day after the storm, Manuel Sinchi, like some other New Yorkers, gathered a few friends, hopped on his bicycle and headed down to badly stricken Coney Island to volunteer his services. The next day, however, he started offering his services at his usual rate of $15 an hour. A day laborer for whom making a living in recent years has meant often pointless idling on street corners for increasingly hard-to-get construction work, Mr. Sinchi said that owners of houses ravaged by Hurricane Sandy were now searching him out seven days a week. In the first weeks after the storm, he performed work that required muscle and a strong back, hauling waterlogged sofas and broken refrigerators out of flooded basements, stripping mold-infested walls and sweeping away mounds of sand from front yards. But, as homeowners turned to rebuilding, he has performed more skilled jobs, installing new wallboard, wood floors and bathroom tiles…
Share this post