Flooded Region May Yield Biggest Garbage Haul Ever

Salvaging the city means throwing much of it away.

Street by street here, and across the entire disaster zone, debris piles are growing in size and number, monuments to the destructiveness of Hurricane Katrina and the messiness of the rebuilding.

The heaps are rising in parking lots and on front lawns and ball fields. The effect is trashing the landscape and creating landscapes of trash.

Carting off all the snapped trees, sodden carpets, moldy drywall and warped furniture will require what experts describe as the biggest garbage haul ever, enough to fill 6 million dump trucks.

And that doesn’t include the tens of thousands of autos and boats headed for scrap yards.

The job won’t be fast, or cheap. State and federal officials say it could take a year to collect, burn, bury and recycle the refuse in Louisiana and Mississippi. The federal government has awarded four companies contracts valued at $2 billion to remove the rubbish, with options to double that amount.

In the meantime, folks must live alongside the festering mounds that seem to frame every roadside view. Some piles reach almost as high as the houses that coughed them up.

“I just smelled it, and it hit me again -- the reality of it,” said Metairie resident Artie Dagoglou, who eyed the fly-buzzing hillock at his driveway: the twisted and sodden remains of a wind-leveled pool awning and flooded game room.

The streets in Dagoglou’s neighborhood resembled canyons of discards, most yanked from downstairs rooms that had been inundated with foul water. Ruined refrigerators lined the curb, doors dangling open.

“More people are going to be coming home and throwing out the food from their refrigerators,” Dagoglou said. “Then it’s really going to stink.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has handed the disposal mission to the Army Corps of Engineers, which hired the contractors.

As of Wednesday, the corps estimated that the storm had spawned 55 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana, 50 million in Mississippi and 2 million in Alabama.

“It’s a sad situation,” said Michael Logue, a corps spokesman in Vicksburg, Miss. “You go down the street, and every time the truck stops, somebody’s life is sitting out on the street.”

State and federal environmental agencies are monitoring the cleanup operation because so much of the junk is toxic, laced with mercury and motor oil, among other things.

“It’s going to be a major effort, but it’s just a matter of processing time,” said Chuck Brown, an assistant secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

Brown said the state was considering reopening old landfills as well as shipping debris on barges and trains to outlying dumps.

But that’s getting ahead of the undertaking. First, thousands of homes and businesses must be emptied of destroyed belongings and inventories -- and many of the structures might have to be razed.

“We’re going to see a huge wave of people throwing things away,” said David Kosson, chairman of Vanderbilt University’s civil and environmental engineering department. “People are assuming that anything that got wet came in contact with sewage, and throwing it away is not unreasonable at all.”

Gutting dwellings has become a thriving industry in the flood region, attracting the likes of David Nyein, who was a Kenner real estate appraiser before Katrina struck. He quickly assembled a crew of six and began charging $1,000 to $6,500 per house to strip rooms of damaged contents and stack them in the front yard.

“Pretty much all the furniture is going,” Nyein said.

At one client’s house, a prosthetic leg went. “It was soaked,” Nyein said.

The government has asked that people separate the debris into four piles for pickup: tree limbs and other vegetation; hazardous items such as bleach and paint; refrigerators, ovens and other appliances, which are known as “white goods”; and “construction and demolition” materials, meaning walls, floors and ceilings, and the stuff of households that resided between them.

Compliance with the sorting rules appears spotty. But Steven Rhoto was making a fairly neat pile of mold-dappled baseboards and doors outside his mother’s Metairie apartment building. Inside, the walls had been torn from the studs.

“I haven’t thrown away the big-screen,” Rhoto said. “Not yet, anyway.”

Brown said the state would try to recycle huge amounts of debris. He told of plans to retrieve 4,000 pounds of mercury from the lights in 350,000 or so ruined cars and strip the fiberglass from 50,000 smashed boats.

The fiberglass could be mixed with cement to shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, Brown said.

The broken trees being ground up in places like Lafrenier Park in Jefferson Parish could go to paper mills, he said.

“We’re trying to use as much of the end product as we can,” Brown said.

But others say that, as laudable as the recycling effort is, it could test the patience of the trash-weary.

“I just wonder if there’s time,” said Paul Templet, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental studies, who once led the state agency headed by Brown.

To Parnell Latham, who lost his boat service business to the hurricane, time is already a luxury. He worked at a Lake Pontchartrain marina where scores of boats were crushed against one another or marooned on the pavement.

Latham hopes to repair his drenched pickup and equipment trailer, and intends to toss just about everything else -- if only there were someone to haul it away.

“It’s been three weeks,” he said. “Nobody’s moving too fast.”

His losses spoke of the large and small scales of Katrina’s rubble.

Latham’s two-story workshop, its metal walls buckled, might have to go into a pile, along with the tiny engine bearings he held in his palm.

“They’re rusted,” he said. “Trash.”