BLACK PUMPS WITH RED UNDERNEATH

Brooch: BLEACH – a test tube filled with the essential chemical in the war on mold and mildew.
Materials: Steel, glass, rubber

“Mud ‘n’ Mold”
I joke with my mother-in-law Stella, a native New Orleanian who grew up in the neighborhood where my studio is now, and possesses the colloquial language particular to the Irish Channel and New Orleans in general, about her use of the word “mud” to mean “dirt”. I, me the Yankee here, tell her that mud is dirt mixed with water to make a paste or slurry. Admonished frequently enough, she catches herself if I’m around and calls dirt dirt. But in reality, her New Orleans based reference for dirt as mud is probably much more accurate. There is no dirt here…there is only mud. We think its dried out and returned to dirt but it don’t take much to make it mud again.

The canals fill with the storm surge pushing the water down the channel and up the walls. Not only is it going up, it’s going down too. It’s going down under the metal sheeting that is driven 25 feet down into the soil that once was a swamp. It should have been driven 40 or 50 feet down to prevent what is about to happen. The subsurface water is infiltrating the light particles of the soil, which is a combination of clay and sand, and turning the whole thing into a particle suspension. It is now a loose paste of “mud”.

At the floodwall things are moving rapidly towards failure. Eventually, the pressure on the walls is greater than the walls ability to resist it because its footings are….floating. It is pushed backwards towards the homes in whose backyards it resides. It flops over and the water picks up the mass of the levee and wall and washes down the slope ready to invade the homes in its path. Next, it changes from mud to a slurry to a soup, that it can’t wait to fill up the empty bowl ahead of it.

It pours into the neighborhoods and seeps into every crack, every broken window, every open door. It fills up the house, floats all the furniture and everything else. Eventually the bowl fills up, having relieved the canals of their burden and a new lake is born. Over the next several weeks the particulate in the soup sinks and settles down to the bottom of that lake, which is your kitchen counter top, your living room floor, or the shelves. Weeks later the remaining water gets sucked out of the bowl by the frantically installed pumps. You return home to a slick, thick, layer of mud on every surface, mud that used to be the levee. (The brown insert in this panel is a kitchen counter top that I cut out of a friends flooded kitchen…note the impression that containers and appliances left behind when the water receded).

Now, it’s the mold and mildew’s turn to visit their peculiar havoc on your home. Black mold may be the worst, but mold of any sort is an environmental hazard that few of us could stand to be exposed to for very long before the mycotoxins produced by these micro-organisms have a negative impact on your health.

One of the primary combatants in the war on mold is simple bleach. To rid your home of the mold spore, which penetrates the walls, floors and ceilings, you have to gut the house of drywall and spray down every stud, rafter and floor board with a strong mixture of bleach and other chemicals.

Buried 3 inch line to lake to supply a large amount of water for tunneling purposes when I get back to work on the Top Secret Bunker. It's buried 2 feet down and I soaked the ground for a day to let it settle. The rain headed this way will finish it off so in the future I'll be able to drive over it. One three inch pump will connect at the end by the lake to run the fire hose I use to dig with and the second 3 inch pump sucks the slurry out of the pit and back down the hill behind the pool and I'll set up a maze of sand fence to let it settle while letting the water drain off. Eventually I'll have that hill built up enough so it is just a gentle grade and easier to cut the grass, and I am going to pump a foot of fill into the pool, redo the bottom and get a new liner put in so it is only 4 feet deep so my wife can excersise in it by walking laps with an artificial / waterproof leg.