NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The surgeons wore hard hats. Dust and mold hazed the air, blackening their hazmat suits and filter masks. Their job Tuesday was to gut a building, not sew up guts.

About 60 members of the American College of Surgeons, surgical residents, and other people associated in one way or another with the group’s clinical meeting in New Orleans were working to turn a building damaged by Hurricane Katrina into a medical clinic.

‘‘I’ve never worn a hard hat before. But I’ll tell you what — I was really glad I had one on when part of the ceiling fell on my head,’’ said Dr. Sylvia Campbell of Tampa, Fla.

She was just back from eight days of surgical volunteering in Haiti, where she had operated on 35 people.

The surgeons were working in a building that once had been a school run by St. Cecelia Catholic Church in the Bywater neighborhood across the Industrial Canal from the Lower 9th Ward.

The church closed in 2001, but the church building and its rectory were renovated for $1.9 million in 2004 and 2005 as a clinic for elderly people. The clinic opened about a month before Hurricane Katrina flooded both buildings in late August 2005.

It reopened in July 2006, aided by a $3 million grant to add a model neighborhood health clinic. Now, the plan is to expand the clinic into the former school building where the people from the surgical meeting were working.

About 200 were expected to take part Tuesday and Wednesday, said Dr. Tom Russell, executive director and president of ACS.

‘‘I’m going to be sore tomorrow,’’ said Dr. Ugwuji Maduekwe of Lagos, Nigeria, who was pulling down ceiling tiles on Tuesday

‘‘If you told my dad I was doing manual labor, the shock would probably kill him,’’ she joked.

One group of volunteers came from University Hospital in Cincinnati, where the staff also donated $5,000 to hurricane recovery and planned to challenge other hospitals represented at the meeting to match it.

‘‘We put our money where our mouth is,’’ said Dr. Sha-Ron Jackson of Los Angeles, a resident at University Hospital and a graduate of Xavier University in New Orleans. ‘‘And then we went to work.’’