Polar explorer says Habitat for Humanity, Red Cross botched Hurricane Sandy home repairs

NY Post ^ | july 28, 2013 | KATE BRIQUELET

[lowbridge]

A Rockaway octogenarian and polar-exploration pioneer says a pair of charities left her high — but not dry — after Hurricane Sandy.

Barbara Hillary, 82, is fighting nonprofit Habitat for Humanity to finish the sloppy job volunteers did on her damp basement, which is covered in mold.

She’s also battling the Red Cross, which wrote a $10,000 check to an unlicensed contractor who promised to fix her kitchen and then flew to Nigeria.

“I’m not a whiner. I’m not a crybaby. I was raised in Harlem during the Depression — I was raised old-school,” Hillary said.

But she added: “I don’t want to die as a result of group incompetence.”

Two months ago, Hillary asked the city’s Habitat for Humanity to rehab her flooded basement.

Hillary says volunteers would show up sporadically or not at all, and the mold never stopped growing as the repairs dragged on.

[Roccus]

Not all, but MOST HfH volunteers I’ve run across are in it for the Tee shirts and hats.

[Conspiracy Guy]

0bama fixed all this! Just ask Chris Christy.

[AlmaKing]

She says she’s not whining, but she has her hand out to the gov’t. She lost me there.

[tflabo]

Is it just me but this story makes her appear a little on the nutty side. Sounds like she hasn’t personally paid one cent for any of the work. Then again incompetence of services is not a rare bird these days.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Building construction is a cinch. Even illegal aliens with no prior experience or the ability to read English can do it.

Why can't well-meaning liberal hipsters do it to?

[jiggyboy]

You can’t possibly be serious. Even (especially?) somebody with no construction experience at all knows that’s crap.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Or the post project beer party.

[GOPJ]

She’s also battling the Red Cross, which wrote a $10,000 check to an unlicensed contractor who promised to fix her kitchen and then flew to Nigeria.

It's time to change the tax code and stop giving a break to non-profits. They're NOT what they used to be.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

The financial mentor Clark Howard is big on not building new homes but re-habbing older homes. I’ve heard him complain many a time.

Clark never explains how he reconciles that to his Habitat for Humanity projects where he builds new homes for the poor and downtrodden.

[max americana]

“Not all, but MOST HfH volunteers I’ve run across are in it for the Tee shirts and hats.”

Same here back at university, and I’ve worked for HFH. They are mostly there for either a college credit and because they’re bleeding heart libtards. Most of these imbeciles don’t know the difference between hammer and saw and based on my experience, most of the volunteers made everything worse.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Does it really seem like a good idea to have “volunteers” who know nothing about home building and maintenance work on your house?

[RetiredTexasVet]

I didn’t see any reference to her money or even insurance payments ..... just begging. All the ones I hear of after the catastrophes are the people (that naturally haven’t purchased insurance) that are dragged before the TV cameras whining about the help was not enough, was not fast enough, was not to their liking, etc. Why was anyone responsible for her kitchen and basement other than herself. I really can’t see any justification because she was a polar explorer .... she could have been a professional pole dancer and had the same amount of phony justification.

[Age of Reason]

I wish Habitat for Humanity would one day fix up a house and give it to me, too.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

We had illegal aliens build our condos, and it's only costing us millions of dollars to fix the few "minor" errors they made.

I'm sure that well-meaning effete liberals would have done just as well.

[ThunderSleeps]

That is the opposite of my experience with H4H. I have personally been involved in building over 30 homes. All the volunteers I have worked with try to do the right thing. Small teams of 3 or 4 are led by someone who knows what they are doing, often working in construction. Specialty work, such as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical is done by the pros - often at cost or donated by a local contractor.

Yes there have been times where some work was not done properly and we had to rework it. I think there is more to this story. Also, my own personnel experience has been that new construction is far far easier than rehabilitation of damaged existing structures. One chapter of H4H I worked with swore off rehab entirely after a particularly bad experience with a donated structure.

[blackdog]

I watched three Mexicans build two floors of a hotel next to the one we were staying in while in Cancun. They used five gallon pails, and a rebar bender. They mixed all the concrete by hand. Every bend, form, and line was perfectly square. They were amazingly skilled with minimal technology and equipment. The plasterer was following them in a similar manner on the floor below.

Now on the flip side, we watched American construction take three years to build a similar structure in Minneapolis. There were hundreds of people on site every day. Those three guys with their ropes, buckets, hammers, and cement hand tools could teach Americans a thing or two.