Salvage Crews

Working El Infierno and the abandoned coast for copper, fixtures, appliances and anything with a scrap price. Organized around trucks and a cutting rig rather than a neighborhood, because there isn't a neighborhood left inside the wire to organize around. What they hold is whichever house they got to first, this week, and they know the ground better than any map exists to.

Last Call is the crew to know: nine years working the dead coast, first on the scene at whatever house is worth stripping, armed for it, and willing to defend a working site if talking doesn't settle who was there first. Rival outfits exist and compete for the same houses; they're rarer than the term "salvage crew" suggests, because the ground is large and the wind makes it dangerous enough that most crews would rather not overlap.

What the crew knows#

• They got there first, or they didn't, and that's the whole negotiation, backed by people who will fight to hold it. Taking a working house by force costs more than working around the crew already on it usually does, but "usually" isn't "always," and a crew that pushes past a negotiation finds out the hard way that these are armed professionals on their own ground.
• Copper, fixtures and appliances are the goods. Paper is worth more per pound and most salvage crews are only starting to work that out.
• No coverage inside the cordon worth the name, so they run on radio and shouting. Comms fail the moment anybody needs them.
• They watch the wind, not the clock, because the wind is what actually threatens them, not the crew or anybody else working the coast.

Standing with the crew#

Neutral, and highly local. Standing with one salvage crew says nothing about standing with the next one over; there's no organization above the truck and four people in front of you.