Amid the clanging of dump trucks, a crane with a clamshell scoop hoisted a pile of debris as big as a minivan and dropped it onto a waiting barge ? striking evidence that New York City has revived a place it just cannot seem to do without.
The Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island, where tons of debris was sifted through after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has once again been enlisted after a disaster, this time to serve as the staging area for the monumental cleanup job under way since Hurricane Sandy hit.
Again and again, that scoop plunges into a three-story hill of debris and lifts out the refuse of the storm: pulverized drywall, floorboards, furniture, clothing, photo albums.
The cleanup has turned into a 24-hour-a-day, military-scale operation at Fresh Kills, with the New York City Sanitation Department and the Army Corps of Engineers running a fleet of several hundred trucks, river barges and tugboats that will be moving an estimated four million cubic yards of debris to landfills in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. And that is just New York City.
Similar operations, on an equally huge scale, are under way on Long Island and in New Jersey, as the next step beyond restoring electricity for the region is cleaning up the giant, putrid piles of waste that represent the overturned lives of the tens of thousands of area residents whose homes were flooded by the storm.
?We will stay here until the job gets done,? said Col. John Pilot, who has temporarily moved to New York from his home base in Florida to supervise the corps? debris removal job.
The effort will be a major test of the Corps of Engineers, as well as of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is paying most of the cleanup bill ? a bill that will easily run into the hundreds of millions of dollars across the region.
As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this same team was condemned for their mismanagement of the cleanup of major parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, as contractors hired by the government ? including some of the same companies working now on Hurricane Sandy cleanup ? were accused of overcharging the government or inflating their bills.
For now, indications are the cleanup in the New York area is off to a relatively smooth start.
The city?s Sanitation Department has converted a wind-bitten dirt lot on an inlet in Fresh Kills into a temporary storage and transfer site for storm debris.
It is just adjacent to the landfill site, where all of the city?s trash was dumped for decades, a facility that was briefly reopened after the 2001 attacks so crews could sift through debris collected from ground zero to search for human remains.
On Wednesday, at the Fresh Kills site, the crane grabbed a mouthful of debris at a time, dropping its load onto a barge, and swiveled back for more. Workers fill four barges at a time, preparing to send them with a tug up to Albany, before the loads are carried again by truck to their final destination, the Seneca Meadows landfill in Waterloo, N.Y.
In total, corps officials said, they expected to be managing more than 1,300 pieces of equipment by the end of the week, including short- and long-haul trucks, Bobcats, excavators and front-end loaders.
?My whole job is keeping this material moving,? said Dennis Diggins, chief of the Bureau of Waste Disposal at the Sanitation Department, which is working alongside the Corps of Engineers to help clean up the city. The department estimated that 250,000 tons of debris from Hurricane Sandy had already been picked up in the city. ?I can?t turn around and put up a flag and say, ?I have no place to go,??? he said.
Huge piles of debris have been created nearer to the actual destruction, including ones at Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways, awaiting transfer to Fresh Kills and then upstate.
The scale of the storm, and thus the job, for the New York metropolitan area is unprecedented, compared with any mid-Atlantic disaster since 1938, according to an official city history. Across the region, an estimated 12 million cubic yards must be cleared, compared with the cleanup job in Lower Manhattan after the 2001 attack, which generated about three million cubic yards of waste.
But it is still far less than the waste spawned by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the Gulf Coast ? more than 100 million cubic yards, the most for a disaster in the United States.
As happened after Hurricane Katrina, local and state governments are taking different approaches on how to handle the cleanup, with some communities hiring their own contractors directly, while others, like New York City, are turning to the corps to help out.
Jack Schnirman, the city manager in Long Beach, N.Y., said it had so far been hiring its own contractors directly, a move that along with the city personnel he estimated would end up costing approximately $100 million ? more than the entire city budget this year, about $87 million.
ann arbor news ides of march elizabeth smart nick young south dakota state long beach state beasley
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.