"Back on the road, Sharafkhani started to work a math problem out loud. He figured, quite conservatively, that there were 100,000 houses that would have to come down in Orleans Parish alone. This number left out St. Bernard and other parishes in greater New Orleans, and also all the cars and boats and commercial structures that would need to be disposed of somewhere.Each house, he said, would produce two or three truckloads of debris. That would add up to 200,000 to 300,000 truckloads, and the major landfills he'd visited earlier were straining to accommodate 400 or so trucks daily.
He did not bother to divide the number of truckloads by the number of days, or weeks, or months it would take to handle them all. Instead, he took a shortcut and reduced the sum of his mathematical musings to a single word: "Years. We are talking years.""
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Putting away New Orleans
By Peter H. King
Los Angeles Times
[EDIT:An excerpt:]
Dumping capacity
Sharafkhani and Meyers did not appear to be part of any bureaucratic "them" conspiring to destroy the century-and-a-half-old shotgun houses — wooden structures so narrow that, it's said, a shotgun blast through the front door would exit through the back and blow a hole in every room — that are an architectural presence in some flooded neighborhoods.
They were just a couple of midlevel scouts from the state Department of Environmental Quality, looking for dumping capacity.
They made stops just outside the city, visiting two huge landfill sites that were receiving 400 truckloads, or roughly five times the normal amount, of debris a day — brush, tree limbs, construction material, refrigerators, all of it mainly from the less damaged suburbs on the west bank of the Mississippi.
Then they crossed over the river, passed through Central Business District and dropped into the eastern sectors of the city, following surface streets through the Lower 9th Ward and toward St. Bernard's Parish. It was here that the rhetoric of rebuilding was confronted by a reality of how much hard work must be done before the first new foundation is laid.
For a long time, they simply rode in silence, as if trying to comprehend what they saw. For block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, mile after square mile, the imagery of ruin was the same: Power lines and trees tangled across yards, cars and boats cast about in the street at strange angles, houses uniformly marked near their rooflines with brown muddy lines indicating the high point of floodwaters — a death sentence, in the view of many construction experts.
Many of the houses had small escape hatches crudely hacked in their rooftops.
They all bore cryptic messages that had been spray-painted by search and rescue crews, marking in uniform hieroglyphics the date of search, the units involved, the number of bodies, if any, found, the number of people, and in some cases, pets, rescued.
What created the most powerful impression, however, was not the degree of damage. Many of the houses, in fact, seemed intact, except for the tell-tale muddy lines. Rather, it was the scale. It just went on and on and on, to an extent that television footage, or satellite photography, or statistics or even words cannot convey.
Making it all the more strange was the utter absence of animation. There might be a sentry posted here, a frazzled cat skulking about there, but mostly there was nothing moving at all: If it hadn't been for Rita's early winds stirring the half-fallen power lines and crippled trees, this might have been a still-life portrait.
Near the water, they stopped to investigate a closed dump site located on what since has been designated a natural preserve. A sunburned person in a hardhat was directing a crew as it worked to buttress a broken levee.
Sharafkhani asked a few questions about the site, which like most of the places scouted that day seemed to offer no real answer to the challenge ahead. Then they fell to talking casually about the scale of destruction. Sharafkhani said it looked to him like nine out of 10 houses in the flood zones would have to come down.
"It's a bulldoze job," the man in the hardhat concluded, "that's for sure."
200,000 truckloads
Back on the road, Sharafkhani started to work a math problem out loud. He figured, quite conservatively, that there were 100,000 houses that would have to come down in Orleans Parish alone. This number left out St. Bernard and other parishes in greater New Orleans, and also all the cars and boats and commercial structures that would need to be disposed of somewhere.
Each house, he said, would produce two or three truckloads of debris. That would add up to 200,000 to 300,000 truckloads, and the major landfills he'd visited earlier were straining to accommodate 400 or so trucks daily.
He did not bother to divide the number of truckloads by the number of days, or weeks, or months it would take to handle them all. Instead, he took a shortcut and reduced the sum of his mathematical musings to a single word: "Years. We are talking years."
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