By Joanne Degnan, Staff Writer
ROBBINSVILLE — After a month of salvaging doors, window sashes and other materials from abandoned buildings in post-Katrina New Orleans, 22-year-old Andrea Magnolo is ready to put her mad hammer skills to use in Hidalgo County, Texas, where people’s lives have been upended by a different hurricane.
Ms. Magnolo, a graduate of Allentown High School whose family lives on Gerson Drive in Robbinsville, is part of a team of 11 AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) members headed to San Juan, Texas — an impoverished area that sustained widespread flooding from Hurricane Alex last summer.
The AmeriCorps team will spend eight weeks in the community repairing damaged houses and providing disaster relief assistance to needy families there, Ms. Magnolo said Dec. 28 while home in Robbinsville visiting her family for the holidays. She left on Sunday for her new AmeriCorps assignment.
”We’ll be working in a very poor community where many people did not have running water or electricity even before the hurricane hit,” Ms. Magnolo said. “The flood damage from Hurricane Alex has made their situation even worse.”
Ms. Magnolo made a 10-month commitment to the AmeriCorps program after graduating from Ursinus College last year. AmeriCorps NCCC is a full-time residential program for men and women 18 to 24 who must complete four weeks of training before they are assigned to service projects throughout the U.S.
AmeriCorps works in partnership with local nonprofit organizations to provide the workers with a place to live and a living allowance stipend of about $100 a week. After completing 10 months of service, AmeriCorps members receive $5,350 toward college tuition or to pay back existing student loans.
However, for most Corps members, the knowledge that they have made a difference is the biggest reward.
”I’m really looking forward to doing this,” Ms. Magnolo said of her next assignment in Texas. “We can’t wait to get out there and work with the families and see the actual progress that’s being made because of our efforts.”
Ms. Magnolo said she was notified in July that she had been accepted into the AmeriCorps NCCC program after a rigorous six-month application process that she began during her senior year. She spent the month of October training at the AmeriCorps campus in Denver and was deployed in November to her first assignment in New Orleans, where she lived in the 9th Ward with 10 other team members in a three-bedroom house built by Habitat for Humanity, the project’s sponsoring organization.
Even though it has been more than five years since Hurricane Katrina struck the city, the Feliciana Street neighborhood where she lived remains desolate, she said. Deserted houses damaged by the high water still stand in ruins with “TFW” (toxic floodwater) spray-painted on the outside, she said. A number beneath the letters indicates how many people were found dead inside after the storm.
”We didn’t have neighbors; there were just empty houses around us,” Ms. Magnolo said. “The house across the street and the house to the side of us were completely abandoned. They were damaged and the people never returned.”
The AmeriCorps NCCC team spent its days working at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, which sells salvaged and donated building materials to the public at discounts of up to 80 percent. All proceeds from sales are used to fund Habitat for Humanity’s home-building projects in New Orleans.
Groups of four or five would take turns going out on salvage expeditions with the supervisors of the 22,000-square-foot Habitat warehouse on Royal Street, Ms. Magnolo said. They would retrieve useable doors, doorframes, windows, shutters, fireplace mantels and other architectural materials from buildings scheduled for demolition, including blocks of homes in the Mid-City section of New Orleans where a new 34-acre state-of-the-art hospital campus is planned.
”We went to any deconstruction site that Habitat had a contract with,” Ms. Magnolo said. “We were basically recycling materials so that others could us them, and all the profits went to build more affordable Habitat housing.”
After the group had loaded up the materials and returned them to the warehouse, Ms. Magnolo said she would have to remove any stray nails still in the wood so each item could be inventoried and put on the warehouse floor for sale.
”A lot of my time was spent with a hammer de-nailing all that wood,” Ms. Magnolo said with a smile.
When her five-day work week was over, Ms. Magnolo said she and a few of her fellow team members volunteered at a homeless shelter where they were deeply moved by all the people they met who were still struggling to get back on their feet since Hurricane Katrina destroyed their homes in 2005.
Ms. Magnolo said the New Orleans assignment was the first of four service projects she will be assigned to during her 10-month commitment to AmeriCorps, which ends in August. Her next mission in San Juan, Texas, is for eight weeks.
The team will live close to San Juan in nearby Mission, Texas, in the basement of a Presbyterian church, where they will sleep on cots and bathe in a six-stall “shower trailer” parked outside the church.
”The team leaders are really excited because we get this shower trailer,” Ms. Magnolo said. “I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounds exciting because in New Orleans we shared a house that had one bathroom for 11 people.”
Ms. Magnolo recalled that when the 11 returned to their Feliciana Street house in New Orleans after work, people would begin to shout out numbers to determine who had first dibs on the one and only shower.
”There was always a shower line,” Ms. Magnolo said laughing. “And I was always at the end because I wasn’t quick enough to shout out a number.”

