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Larry Williams stands beside the wood forms into which he hopes to pour the slab for his new house, replacing the one that burned in the Labor Day wildfires at Spicewood. He’s not sure whether his tools will be sufficient to the job of spreading and smoothing the concrete, and whether there will be anyone to help him. “But I’ve faced worse problems,” Williams said. Three days after the fires, when he and his wife, Dawn, were allowed back in to see what was left to salvage, they found almost nothing. The fire had hopped and skipped through his area, and his was one of only two homes on the block to burn. It was a total loss. Everything was gone. He went to work the same day to clear his lot of debris and start rebuilding. There was no insurance money; Williams is a residential construction framer, and couldn’t afford insurance. Neither has he received any government reconstruction money. “I hadn’t planned to spend our retirement savings building a new house,” Williams explained, but that’s what there is, so I don’t have any choice. “I work part of the time building other people’s houses to make money to come back and build on my own.” Williams has had some assistance from friends, neighbors and local churches, both with materials and labor. Now another church has promised concrete on Thursday. Williams is not sure his smoothing machine will work, so it may have to be leveled and smoothed by hand. But that’s how he firmed the fill-dirt — by hand — after his tamping machine broke. Hand-spreading and -smoothing the concrete will require manpower, and that’s a chronic problem in disaster recovery; individuals and organizations promise to come help, but sometimes can’t. Volunteers are especially hard to find on weekdays. “I’m still hoping,” Williams said, “and if nobody shows, I’ll just have to do as much as I can myself before the concrete sets up.” Mark Creaney has just taken over the job of recruiting volunteers for these kinds of jobs for the Spicewood Long Term Recovery Committee (LTRC), which is trying to find resources — mostly money and manpower — to help the survivor families rebuild and recover. “I’m talking to everyone I can find,” Creaney said, “but it’s hard to get volunteers out on a Thursday, and the responses I’m getting are pretty weak.” Hiring professional crews to come do the work is out of the question. The low-income homeowners the LTRC is helping can’t afford to hie them, and the committee is struggling just to find money for materials, so volunteer manpower will be critical to rebuilding the homes. Some groups or individual volunteers are working somewhere every weekend in the Spicewood area. Whether they’ll be there to help Williams Thursday is still a question. To volunteer to help with the Thursday job or any other, call Mark Creaney at 512-418-6241. To offer materials, tools or money to buy them, contact the Rev Tommy Wilborn at 512-565-0800.