Just wondering if anyone who’s been through one of these hurricane clean-ups can tell me…do they salvage usable wood from the sites to use in rebuilding? Do they pick through the rubble first and then just scoop up the unusable stuff or do they put it in a big pile and pick through that? If they don’t salvage, how to they dispose of the tons and tons and TONS of wood? Just curious.
My guess is that they will burn it. As much as new lumber may cost, it would cost too much to reclaim the 2X4s and such that were already used to build a house. Plywood and OSB (oriented-strand board, two steps up from particle board) both delaminate when wet and become useless, so all of the sheating is lost as well. Any wood siding that it still in reasonable shape could be salvaged, but again, it would cost less to bulldoze the homes and start fresh.
That said, I suspect that a lot of the homes that are still standing but waterlogged will be gutted from the inside and the remaining shells will be finished out.
There’s an attention-getting letter from CFR (the Council on Foreign Relations, Global Health Program) that takes a position on recycling there (try bullet point 5 or search for “burn”). Cornflake’s post is no doubt the simplest solution, but the enormous volume of material, the need for much of it, and the available labor supply would mesh productively.
The rest of the letter is worth reading, due to the experience this group has had all over the Earth in various events such as the tsunami response, major epidemic outbreaks, refugee crises, and so on, that they have worked with.
He makes interesting points on the results in lives-saved under different approaches. “From that moment the call was not for rescue, but for “law and order”. We are only now returning to a serious rescue mode…In our experience such shifts of external public opinion, however transient they may be, have enormous outcomes on the ground, where minutes may have life-and-death consequences.”
There’s another major point on leadership and population response.
I am quite surprised to see that link suggest using rubble containing scrap wood as levee-type filler. It will decompose and form hidden pockets. That’s not good.
Burning is absolutely out of the question. A lot of wood products contain materials that are toxic when burned. Plywood, chipboard, masonite siding, pressure treated lumber, etc. So it should not be burned even if “clean”.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of the material is now heavily contaminated with sewage and chemicals. (The area around NO has a lot of chemical plants and refineries, floodwaters spread a lot of Bad Stuff around.) You pretty don’t want to be near the stuff. Burning it just will spread it. Forget that. (Yeah, I know, the local idiot squad will just pile it up and burn it. But one can hope the word can get out to some of them.)
There will be a lot of concrete and rock in the debris, but the question is how to separate it and then make it safe to use.
All in all, haul if all off to a lined land fill and bury it. It will be treated as low level toxic waste.
Remember, the WTC waste was toxic (and not just because of human remains) and that wasn’t sitting in sewage and LA’s finest chem brew.
I heard them talking about this very issue on the news a couple of days ago. The guy being interviewed said that in one of the big Florida hurricanes, there was a big abandoned mine nearby where they dumped all the rubble, but there’s nothing like that near New Orleans, so disposing of rubble is going to be a big problem down the line.
I live in Slidell-just outside of New Orleans. Right now I am visiting Birmingham indefinitely. Sigh.
Louisiana has experience with hurricanes, not like Florida, but experience none the less. The richest guy in town is the one with the Corps of Engineers contract to clean up after a storm. His company travels all over the south cleaning things up. And all the debris goes into landfills. This company gets the contract because they have the ability to quickly locate and make arrangements with landfills. Finding a place to put the debris is the key step in the cleanup. This company has the contacts to do that and (mostly) stay out of jail. They lost a few people in N. Carolina a few years ago when the fed audit showed unexplained payments and unapproved landfills. But mostly they get it right or at least get away with it.
This is partily my opinion and partly based on news reports I have read:
But disposing of the debris is the hardest part of the cleanup. And one of the saddest parts of disposing of the debris is landfilling all the donated goods. Times have changed regarding material goods. It is far cheaper to order a dozen pallets of shirts from china than to sort through big boxes of used clothing making sure all the razor blades are out of the pockets (it happens, unfortunately). Charities still collect donations because of the PR value, but most of the ‘durable goods’ end up in the landfills simply because it is too expensive to support even volunteers to sort clean and package the material. So, send $ if you really want to help.
If my experiences with sorting clothes in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd are any indication, that’s probably the best thing to do. Most of what was donated to the shelter I worked at was ragged and filthy. There were a few really nice things – surplus shirts donated by businesses, and a couple of racks of nice non-dressy ladies’ outfits. But we were definitely throwing out much more than we were keeping.
Wouldn’t mold also be another issue with the wood?
Maybe, but given the long exposure, temperature and humidity, there may be a problem with black mold. If so, only the shell can be saved.
Another possible problem, reminiscent of NYC after 9/11, is toxic industrial waste contaminating the flood waters and thus the dwellings. New Orleans is a major shipping point and has much industry. There’s no telling what is in that water.
Sure. Wood already has a dose of sleeping microorganisms awaiting the correct mixture of warmth and moisture to bloom. That statement can be applied to many other building products as well.
Make that: only the FOUNDATION can be saved.
I immediately thought of a line from a song by Paul Curreri:
“Come by a man who was chopping trees;
I probably shouldn’ta asked it.
Said, “Whatcha gonna do with all that wood?”
He said, “My business is in caskets.” Good Lord!”
My husband suggested mulching a lot of it…I’m not sure that’s an option either. I just can’t believe how much there is. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost like they’ll have to create a landfill just for this disaster. I can’t see how the existing landfills will be able to handle it. It’s just. too. much.
I agree. I expect that a lot of these homes will be stripped back to the shell, sprayed with a bleach solution (if that) and rebuilt to varying degrees of completion.
I think is hard for a lot of us to underestimate the crap that some poor people have to accept as living conditions. To give one example, I’ve helped repaint some homes where the bottom foot or so of the framing had obviously rotted away and the board and batten siding was holding up the roof; you could tell where things were hung on the inside walls by the nails and drywall screws that stuck through to the outside. At least the outsides looked nice enough after we were done that they complemented the well cared for yards. It was obvious that the owners or tenants cared for their homes; they just didn’t have enough money to properly maintain them.
Once the rebuilding takes place, I expect that a lot of owners will do whatever works best within a nonexistent budget and/or some landlords will do whatever minimizes their out of pocket expenses. The homes may not be fixed up, but a lot of them weren’t in good shape before the flood either.
Big demolition contractors are actually pretty good at recycling concrete rubble. They have huge machines such as this that crush the concrete, sort out the rebar, sift out the light material, and end up with a gravel-like product that can be used as roadbed or potentially levee material. (The photos at the link are too small to really show much, but they give a good description.)
Given the huge amount of demolition likely to take place, I’d be suprised if a large operation such as this was not set up. Especially considering gas prices and the cost of trucking everything to faraway landfills.
No way. They are too contaminated, not just with mold, but chemical waste and biological hazards from sitting for weeks in that toxic soup. Spritzing with bleach won’t do anything to make them less dangerous.
Under normal circumstances, you would be right. But these are extraordinary circumstances, and I won’t be a bit surprised to see environmental regulations waived to allow the burning of thousands of tons of debris. We’re talking 150,000 houses that will have to be demolished and hauled away. No way that is going to be disposed in a landfill. Just like the polluted water they are pumping into Lake Ponchartrain; in light of the magnitude of the cleanup that lies before use, we do not have the luxury of protecting the environment.
Maybe some power plants that run on oil can be re-fitted to burn the wood? Power plants already have filters to prevent toxins from escaping into the air, the burning wood can be put to decent use, and it would help alleviate some of the shortage of oil that the hurricane had caused.
Something like a garbage incinerator would be needed. You will never manage to remove all of the fiberglass insulation, asphalt shingles, tar paper, plastics, etc.
I’m wondering, what did we do with all the debris from Hurricane Andrew?
Can none of this wood be turned into pulp, treated, and made into paper? It’s essentially scrap. I don’t know too much about the paper-making process, so I was just wondering.
It is contaminated with chemical waste. Even if the bacteria could be neutralized, it is still saturated with toxic chemicals, not something you want in paper products.
Retrofitting from oil to wood would be a HUGE project. The wood will be in landfills before they could even get the power plant selected and the design done. And, as awldune mentioned, the wood will be full of impurities. All these impurities are left behind as the wood burns which cause great problems to standard boilers, especially retrofitted oil boilers, and even many coal boilers.
No, it would have to be burned in special plants usually called “Resource Recovery” or something like that, which are essentially garbage incinerators with the ability to produce power from the burning garbage. But there are not enough of them in the country to even begin to make a dent on this level of garbage.