Two crises collided this spring in Michigan. The state was already under a coronavirus lockdown when a catastrophic storm hit and a pair of dams failed, flooding the city of Midland.

The local hospital, MidMichigan Medical Center - Midland, hired a disaster recovery company to clean up the mess, including a water-logged basement and morgue. More than 100 workers — many of them recent immigrants — were brought from as far away as Texas and Florida. Bellaliz Gonzalez was one of them.

"There were cracks in the safety protocols," Gonzalez, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, said in Spanish through an interpreter. "We would start working without masks and then the supervisors would say, 'We're going to go look for masks,' when we were already working inside!"

"It smelled like something rotten, decomposed," she added. "Like something putrid, pungent. It was horrible."

Michigan had strict rules in place for essential workers during the pandemic, but Gonzalez and other workers interviewed by NPR said those rules weren't followed. The workers said they were put up in cramped hotel rooms, and weren't given enough protective equipment.

Many of the disaster recovery workers who came to Midland did get sick.