Weather Disaster Cleanup: Costly & Inefficient, But Necessary

22-03 Weather Disaster Cleanup: Costly & Inefficient, But Necessary

[00:00:00] Reed Pence: This is Radio Health Journal. I'm Reed Pence. This week: weather disasters are increasing, how do we manage the cleanup?

[00:00:07] Dr. Sybil Derrible: It's hard to believe that it's about redesigning buildings, so that we can do something when they get destroyed. I mean, it's really far-fetched when you think about it.

[00:00:15] Reed Pence: After tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires, when Radio Health Journal returns...

[00:00:21] Nancy Benson: I'm Nancy Benson, host of Radio Health Journal. If you enjoy listening to Radio Health Journal, you'll also like our sister show Viewpoints, which covers a wide array of topics from education to history, to the environment. Here's a preview of what they're covering this week on Viewpoints:

There are some people who are like, okay, I want a big pile of money, cause it's going to look pretty. But that's not most people. Most people need to have something, in particular, that they are working towards.

[00:00:49] Gary Price: Is 2022 the year you get your finances in order? Then:

I'd done a painting of Bin Laden when he was captured and killed. And, that was a big cover.

[00:01:01] Marty Peterson: Meeting the man behind some of the most prominent illustrations of our time. I'm Marty Peterson.

[00:01:07] Gary Price: And I'm Gary Price. These stories in depth, this week on your public affairs magazine, Viewpoints.

[00:01:14] Marty Peterson: Listen to Viewpoints on your favorite radio station and subscribe and listen to shows anytime on Apple Podcasts and Google Play.

[00:01:23] Reed Pence: Weather-related disasters are becoming much more frequent and more severe, often out of sync with normal seasons. For example, about a month ago, rare December tornadoes tore through Kentucky, Illinois, and several other states, killing around 90 people and leaving thousands more homeless. The physical and psychological wounds of being hit by a tornado, hurricane or wildfire can be severe and last for years. But the physical structure of towns may not recover very quickly either.

[00:01:58] Dr. Sybil Derrible: We're really talking about years. So the priority, whenever a disaster happens, is to clear out the roads. So really to push all the debris that are on the roads, so that emergency vehicles can come in and help people who are there in the disaster site. That's really the priority.

[00:02:12] Reed Pence: That's Dr. Sybil Derrible, Professor of Urban Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[00:02:18] Dr. Sybil Derrible: Now you have to realize that there's usually massive amounts of debris and waste, massive and massive amounts. And the local resources in terms of trucks and chargers, etc., etc., that can pick up all the debris. Bring them somewhere -- there's not that many resources, not much equipment -- then where do you bring it? So if you have something that you think can be recycled, you have to bring it to a recycling facility. Again, you don't have tens or hundreds of these facilities or on disaster sites. Usually you have... you're very, very limited. And from the time that they process all that takes again a lot of time. And then even if you want to bring it to a landfill, landfills have limited capacity. And we're really just talking about massive amounts of waste and debris that have to fit through the head of a little needle. And that just doesn't happen over a few weeks. That really happens over several years.

[00:03:09] Reed Pence: The first stage of cleanup, once access is assured to roads and buildings, is simply to gather up as much of the wrecked material as possible, and dump it all in one place. Anywhere there's room.

[00:03:21] Dr. Nazli Yesiller: These are temp storage facilities, a temporary storage facility, a temperature storage site, which is basically just an empty land. It could be a sports field, it could be a park, something like that. Essentially, an open lot, an empty lot.

[00:03:34] Reed Pence: Dr. Nazli Yesiller is Director of the Global Waste Research Institute at California Polytechnic State University and coauthor with Derrible of a paper examining natural disaster cleanup.

[00:03:46] Dr. Nazli Yesiller: What happens next is that this material generally ends up being stored there for extended periods of time. Because of the need to, first of all, find places for these debris materials. The local waste management facilities may or may not have sufficient capacity. The recycling facilities may not be able to handle the extremely large amounts of incoming materials. Similarly, landfills may not be able to handle these also. And the process can take up to months easily, and in excess of even years. We have noted in some previous disasters that even after a year had passed and there are still materials -- not properly managed, not properly disposed of in the disaster affected areas.

[00:04:35] Reed Pence: Yesiller and Derrible cite a variety of examples of the massive scale of disaster cleanups. The Camp Fire, one of several California wildfires in 2018, left behind contaminated waste that weighed as much as 2 million cars. After hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area in 2005, nearly 900,000 white goods, such as refrigerators, had to be disposed of.

[00:05:01] Dr. Sybil Derrible: A lot of the time, you don't know what to do with it because it's not a clean refrigerator that you can bring somewhere and recycle. If it's been damaged by water, maybe can recycle, maybe not. That depends. Even if it can be recycled again, it's nearly a million of them. Right? So it's really a lot of them. So it's going to take time, and if it cannot be recycled and it has to be brought to a landfill, we need to make sure that it's a landfill that can accept that type of debris. So you have different types of landfills, the most common I'm going to say is you have your regular municipal goods -- so what we throw in the trash. And the second kind is for everything that's hazardous. So thinking about pesticides, about paint, about herbicides, all these things, you don't throw that in your normal trash. It has to go to a different landfill. And so whenever you have a tornado, that's mixing just about everything together, sometimes you need to go to the special landfills and there are even fewer of them. So, again, it's a massive, massive problem.

[00:05:52] Dr. Nazli Yesiller: Scale is a big issue. Yes, certainly, scale is probably the biggest issue. Also, there are other factors, such as the nature of the materials -- commingled materials are difficult to deal with. Again, there's always the consideration of recycling and reuse. However, when you have a very heterogeneous mixture of materials, everything mixed together, that becomes an issue, also. How do you separate these? You need to have a lot of people, a lot of capacity to be able to do that, which is not easy. As you mentioned, when you're dealing with millions of tons of debris and wastes in the aftermath of, especially these large scale events.

[00:06:30] Reed Pence: Large-scale events require large amounts of money to clean up, and large numbers of people to do it. Hurricane Katrina, for example, generally is cited for a $2 billion cleanup bill, but much of it happens at individual homes, a little at a time. When absolutely everything in a home is smashed together, sorting it out becomes one of the biggest problems in cleanup.

[00:06:53] Dr. Nazli Yesiller: From households, however, you can imagine that there are a mixture of things that come out from a residence. And some of those are contaminated materials, hazardous materials, including lead paint, mercury in electronics, mercury in thermometers, asbestos that might be present in old shingles and things of that nature. And those are difficult. There are tests that can be conducted. Sampling can be made to look for those, or if you're suspecting that the shingles are going to be contaminated, you may select to not recycle them at all. And say that this waste stream is going to go to a landfill, they will not bother with this.

[00:07:34] Reed Pence: It's a nightmarish task, but who pays for it and who actually does the work?

[00:07:39] Dr. Sybil Derrible: It depends on the type of disaster, if it's a federal disaster or not. But usually, I mean, the state does everything. When FEMA comes in, the funds come in, to bring some resources. But a lot of the times what they're going to do is to just foot the bill at the end of the day. So the states really are responsible. They work with local partners, they will work with local industries to help people onsite. But, again, there's that priority. So first, it's going to be cleaning out of the roads and then you have the houses. I know there's a very good example in California with the wildfires there. You know, everything is just burnt to the ground. So not only do you have to clean up the areas, but even have to remove the top soil because all of that now is contaminated. And so you have agencies, usually state agencies, they go and they clean those sites one by one. And when that happens, you know, when you have hundreds of houses or buildings that were destroyed, again, that takes a long time to clean up.

[00:08:29] Reed Pence: But no matter what they do, Yesiller and Derrible say disaster cleanup is often vastly inefficient and wasteful. Experts now know that with climate change weather disasters are likely to become more frequent. Avoiding them is going to become less likely, so local planners in communities all over the country are consulting with those in places like Florida where weather disasters happen often. They're learning how to cope with massive amounts of debris when the worst happens to their area.

[00:08:59] Dr. Sybil Derrible: The scale of it is huge. And again, we're getting more and more and more of them. So it's really getting overwhelming rapidly. What we try to do is, even before the disaster happens, is try to have contracts with local landfills or recycling facilities. So that in the case, in the event of a disaster they're ready and they can process the waste and the debris. But it still takes a long time. Then it's when you just have big truck or just big charger charging all the debris into a truck and bringing it to a facility. How do you know what's recyclable? How do you know what's not recyclable? I mean, this is not easy. It's not, you know, usually recycling is done by hand. So you go to a recovery facility, you have some automatic sorting going, going on with metals -- with ferrous and non-ferrous metals. But at the end of the day you have a lot of lines and workers, you know, just sorting them. So you can't do that again with massive quantities of debris and waste. So it's really not that obvious. I mean, it's actually a very challenging process.

[00:09:52] Dr. Nazli Yesiller: Typically in landfills, there is extra capacity. They landfill facilities report their readiness or let's call it fullness level. Let's say they have facilities, certain size, certain number of cells. And there's always those in regulations that keep track of how much of that capacity is used and what is available. But typically those are for the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, long time periods, all of a sudden when they disaster. There's generally some capacity on landfills, however, it's typically not sufficient. So things get sent out to other states, in some cases. Or again, the reason why things stay in storage for extended periods of time is due to the fact that there is no place to send these materials in the short term.

[00:10:41] Reed Pence: Individuals have a responsibility too. Maybe we can't predict that our home may be blown apart by a tornado, but prevention still plays a role. We can put up stronger buildings and there are places where disasters are more likely. We need to avoid building there.

[00:10:57] Dr. Sybil Derrible: So if we're near the coastline -- and we have a lot of hurricanes and we expect that to happen, or at least, you know, maybe some sea level rise -- what we want to do is to try to build parks. Put stuff there that we don't mind if it gets flooded or if it gets damaged. And that's number one. Number two in the longer term, what we're really trying to do now is we're really realizing that buildings are going to be damaged. Whether you're in a disaster prone area or not, buildings at some point are going to collapse or they're going to be torn down. So ideally what we can do in the long run is to rethink completely how we redesign buildings, the type of material that we choose, and even the individual products that we have at home -- like those herbicides and pesticides -- to have them just not be hazardous. So I know it's hard to believe that it's about redesigning buildings, so that we can do something when they get destroyed. I mean, it's really, far-fetched when you think about it. But the fact is that we're just going to see those types of disasters more and more. And so rethinking how we build buildings in the first place, maybe to have them stronger so that they can handle disasters more efficiently.

[00:11:58] Dr. Nazli Yesiller: Try to avoid, if possible, as much as possible, the most disaster prone areas. If, again, if that's an option, it may not be an option, you may have to rebuild on the same area again. You cannot go north, south. There's no option. So that's one thing, to consider a different area, perhaps. Building better is another option. If we are able to build structures that can withstand these disaster events better, that would help with things. Also looking at a little more futuristic or maybe more easily recyclable materials. If it's possible to use less toxic materials, less hazardous materials in construction. In our households also, as materials get less and less toxic, less and less hazardous, it would be easier to deal with the aftermath of these events.

[00:12:52] Reed Pence: Yesiller says recycling capacity is also often overlooked in planning, something that needs to be reversed. We can't take whole towns to the landfill. You can find out more about Dr. Sybil Derrible and Dr. Nazli Yesiller and all of our guests through links on our webpage radiohealthjournal.org. I'm Reed Pence. Coming up next week on Radio Health Journal:

It's not only about how well they can do their job and shoot at the target and use force when needed or not. It's also about their stress about their sleep, their food, and those kinds of interventions are missing. How do we help America's most sleep deprived profession, law enforcement.

[00:13:40] Nancy Benson: Then things to consider when it comes to pet food. Obesity affects up to two-thirds of dogs and cats that present to their veterinarian. So it is the most common nutritional disorder that veterinarians are faced with on a daily basis.

[00:13:52] Reed Pence: All that and more on Radio Health Journal.

[00:14:00] Shel Lustig: And that's Radio Health Journal for this week. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to learn more and check Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify for a library of past programs. Plus you'll always find previous segments and information about our guests at radiohealthjournal.org. Join us again next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.