I spent all of last week in Indianapolis for work, which turned out to be good timing on my part because on Tuesday night a standpipe burst in our stairwell and the building was evacuated due to the ensuing flood. The Philly fire department didn't declare the building safe for re-entry until last night, so Ben had to spend the week bouncing between hotels and friends' couches. He also had to buy new clothes and toiletries, since he didn't think to pack a bag when the alarm went off Tuesday night.
By the time I got back to Philly we were allowed back onto our floor, so thankfully I could go straight home from the airport. You could tell something had happened, though, because there are still a ton of water damage cleanup trucks all around the building, and a lot of guys coming in and out. Also, our hallway is filled with these things:
They are generating a lot of heat as they dry the place out, so much so that we have to have the air conditioning on despite it only being 70 degrees outside. Also, we've already had to evacuate once today because the dust kicked up by the cleanup crews set off the fire alarm - this time we grabbed clean clothes and toothbrushes on our way out, though. Fortunately we were allowed back in quickly, so the only harm was having to walk up and down 12 flights of stairs (the elevators are still being repaired).
So, things are a bit annoying right now, but we are actually incredibly lucky. The standpipe burst in two places - the 28th floor and the 6th floor - and all the units on those floors, as well as all the units for several floors beneath them, were destroyed by the immense amounts of water. We live on one of a few floors in the middle of the building that were almost completely unaffected. People on the damaged floors still aren't allowed back into their units, and basically all of their possessions are gone. On our way down the stairs today we peeked into the sixth floor, and the cleanup workers are literally dismantling and removing the walls because they are so badly damaged. We have insurance, but I honestly don't know what I would do if suddenly everything we owned was gone. Also, and this is not a big deal in the grand scheme of life, but my wedding dress is in the closet - I keep thinking how (irrationally) upset I would be if it was ruined before I got to wear it.
The other interesting thing to come of this is the amount of local media attention it has received. There have been several articles about it in the Philly papers and even a few short clips on the news, and Ben said there were news crews grabbing people for interviews on the night it happened. Even this morning, when we went to get breakfast a reporter stopped us on our way out of the building to ask for our comments. I don't particularly mind, but I also don't think it is really a big enough deal to merit anything more than a short notice in the local paper. What I
do mind, though, is the almost certainty that the extra attention is not unrelated to the fact that we live in a mostly affluent, mostly white part of the city. I spent some time scouring the internets to find similar incidents in other parts of the city that are less affluent and predominately occupied by people of color, and was not surprised that the few incidents I could find brief notices about were not at all accompanied by this level of hoopla. I have been thinking about white privilege a lot recently in the context of my work, so having this glaring example of it right in front of me is really driving home the fact that you don't have to be actively prejudiced to benefit from being white in the context of institutionalized racism. The question is what to do about it...
