The airport job was a good one.
You could put food on the table, buy boots for the kids and have enough left for an overnight or two in Atlantic City.
All that changed in time, and now Victor Nunez, with 33 years on the job, was headed to work in the early hours at John F Kennedy International Airport with a new reason to lament the way things are: Ebola.
The deadly virus had been the talk for weeks around Terminal 4, where the West African flights come in.
People were nervous.
Nunez, 57, is a truck driver at JFK and delivers food and drink to four or five jetliners during a typical shift in one of those small boxy vehicles that rises on hydraulic lifts to the cabin doors.
Showing up before dawn on October 16, he was being told, and not for the first time, that he would have to service an aircraft arriving from Nigeria.
There are no direct flights to the US from countries where the Ebola outbreak has claimed thousands of lives – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – and so Nigeria with its carrier Arik Air becomes one option.
Nunez and his partner, Victor Santos, 51, saw Arik on their schedule and told their supervisor they refused to go on board.
Find someone else, they said.
Their wariness had been building for weeks.
They’d done more than their share of these flights, maybe eight since the outbreak began in September.
They figured their years of experience must be working against them in convincing the higher-ups to find substitutes.
Nunez has worked 17 years at LaGuardia Airport and the last 16, with a different company, on the other side of Queens at JFK.
He knows the layout of many of the aircraft.
He works quickly, without fuss.
A wall in his living room in a Queens neighbourhood is covered with employee-of-the-month plaques.
Nunez is the father of three and a new grandfather.
His eyes grow stern when he talks about Ebola.
“If we get an infection, we infect the family. We need protection. We don’t know who comes on the plane. Nobody knows
.”
Just one day after he refused to go on board, a 33-year-old doctor who had been fighting the epidemic in West Africa arrived at JFK – and on Thursday tested positive for Ebola.
Craig Spencer, checked his temperature twice a day and first felt symptoms when he ran a fever on Thursday, New York City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett said.
He is the city’s first diagnosed case.
Nunez said the blue rubber gloves issued by his employer, LSG Sky Chefs, an airline that produces 532 million meals last year for more than 300 airlines, aren’t enough.
In response to questions about how much protective gear it provides, LSG Sky Chefs said: “Our company maintains the highest standards of cleanliness and hygiene, as well as follows the Centers for Disease Control guidelines (CDC) in every step of our complete processes.”
Nunez drives a truck to the back of the aircraft and Santos drives his truck to the front.
After lifting the load of metal carts and carriers to the cabin door, they climb aboard, installing new supplies and taking with them the empty containers and trash.
Sometimes the refuse, all kinds of liquids included, spill out and they must pick it up.
With the potential for Ebola lurking in that mess, they needed suits, better gloves and shoe covers, Nunez said.
Enhanced security
After their first request for more protection last month, they say they were given a few thin paper masks that might sell at the local hardware for weekend painters.
CDC online guidelines for workers inside aircraft and involved in cleaning list as necessary waterproof gloves, surgical mask, goggles and gown.
JFK was designated earlier this month as one of five airports with enhanced security for the crisis.
Passengers arriving from West Africa are screened for fever and other symptoms.
This week, those same five became the only places where flights from West Africa could land.
A walk through Terminal 4 on a recent afternoon revealed a heavy presence of law enforcement, including a pair of armed soldiers who stood monitoring exiting passengers.
On October 16, around 5.30am, Nunez saw the Nigerian jetliner had landed but he and Santos were busy with another flight.
Three hours later, a co-worker approached and told them no one was being allowed on or off the Arik aircraft.
An unnamed passenger had died on board
.
Ebola, Nunez feared, had come to JFK.
Still, his superiors were pressing him to go on board.
Finally, they agreed to drive their trucks up to the plane, but would not get out or go on board. “I rolled up my windows and locked the door,” Nunez said.
They were told they could wait in their trucks while a team of five, including two supervisors, would do the work on the aircraft, he said
.
Sitting there, Nunez decided to take notes on his cellphone keyboard.
Should he be blamed for the delay occurring in front of him, he’d have a record.
He is a careful man.
He drives a 2007 Kia because he says thieves are not interested in that make or model.
Add to that the changed work atmosphere. Airlines walk a precarious line between success and failure.
Schedules are tighter than when he started, managers less tolerant of extra time spent on task.
At 11.25am, he described the last ambulance leaving the scene.
He got a call from a flight co-ordinator who works with drivers and was told the passenger vomited in the plane before he died.
At 12.10pm, he wrote, “estan bajando el cadaver, lo estan entrando camioncito cogelador” which translates roughly as “they are lowering the cadaver into a small freezer truck”.
Employees’ safety
The body, Nunez said, was carried out by workers in protective suits, shoe coverings, all the things he says he and his partner had requested and, so far, have failed to get.
A replacement crew went aboard and replenished the supplies.
When they were done, Nunez and Santos drove off and went back inside the airport.
Along with their union representative for Local 100 Unite Here, Miguel de la Rosa, they met with members of the company’s human resources department.
“They asked what we wanted and we told them,” Nunez said, ticking off the protective gear that would allay his fears.
Contacted after the meeting, de la Rosa said the company representatives had agreed to provide the gear, but wouldn’t say when.
“We have actively discussed the safety of our employees during the recent Ebola cases and will continue to provide them with additional information that addresses this issue to alleviate further concerns,” LSG Sky Chefs, a unit of Deutsche Lufthansa, said without providing further details
.
As it turns out, the man on board died of a heart attack.
There was no Ebola.
But in a larger sense, Nunez’s isn’t a story about Ebola.
It’s about a job that used to be something to reach for.
Nunez moved to New York as a teenager in 1974 with his family, jammed in with 10 others in a two-family home in Queens.
Because he helped his father in his grocery store in the Dominican capital of Santiago, he learned early about the rewards of putting in a day.
His first job was dishwasher in an Italian restaurant at $130 (R1 427) a week.
He moved to a plastics factory where he was molder.
In 1980, a sister told him about an opening at LaGuardia.
The coffee was free and so was the health insurance
.
Two years into the job, he met his wife, Susana, who still works at LaGuardia in food prep.
A year later they married, their bosses donating three cases of champagne to the party.
They raised three children: Victor, 29, and two daughters.
The middle daughter, Vickiana, 24, lives at home.
Nunez and his wife share the space with her sister and family.
An American flag covers the top front of the house, painted on by Nunez.
Inside, evidence abounds of a rich family life.
Wedding pictures adorn a living room wall.
On another are a slew of karate and baseball trophies earned by the children.
On a recent afternoon, Nunez dug through a box of family photos and newspaper articles and came up with a picture of his youngest daughter, Juviana.
She is 19 and in her second year of college outside Boston.
In the old photo, she is a baby cradled in the arms of a cardiac surgeon at St Francis Hospital on Long Island.
Juviana was born with two holes in her heart.
Doctors gave her a 5 percent chance of survival.
Three corrective surgeries later, she is making her parents proud with her determination to graduate.
And all those medical bills?
They were paid through the health insurance that was free.
Today, Nunez pays $76 a week for him and Juviana for health coverage he knows is less comprehensive.
He makes $15.04 an hour before taxes.
Last week, he took home $378.
At that rate, he doesn’t know when or if he can ever retire.
He shudders to think about trying to keep his girl alive if she were born today with his pay and benefits.
“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head.
“Never. She wouldn’t make it.”
In that sense, Ebola only makes a scary job scarier. – Bloomberg