Disposal of trash a big effort

NEW ORLEANS — Bernard Dunklin's pills sit next to a baby stroller. Glenn Dominick's legal papers flutter in the breeze. Susan Devlin's medical records are stuck to a water-damaged photo and an elementary-school certificate of achievement for Samantha Devlin.

"There's shoes, thousands of coolers, cots, clothes, it's all mixed up now," Kevin Webb said after he dumped a truckload of garbage from the Superdome in a vacant lot a mile from downtown New Orleans. "There were a lot of people packed to leave, but then they couldn't take their stuff with them. It's all toxic now."

Many of the tens of thousands of people who fled their homes to seek refuge in the Superdome and the convention center grabbed their most important belongings before they left, their vital documents, their medicines, their photos and keepsakes, the things they didn't want to lose when they faced losing everything.

But in the chaos of the evacuation, they weren't allowed to take most of those things with them when they were airlifted or bused out of the city. The treasures now are mixed with trash, and much of it will be burned or dumped in landfills as New Orleans struggles to clean up the millions of tons of debris and garbage left by Hurricane Katrina.

At the makeshift dump near downtown, the National Guard is depositing bags of trash and neighbors are dumping contents of their refrigerators. A bag labeled "biohazardous waste" lies mixed in with cots from the Superdome and fences that were used to corral people outside for days until they could be evacuated. Flies swarm in the pile, and maggots have infested some of the bags.

Trucks also are taking Superdome debris to the Jefferson Parish landfill, where dump trucks have been lining up. Downed tree limbs are being piled up on a vacant lot in Algiers. Mayor Ray Nagin has said New Orleans garbage at some point will have to head to landfills across the country.

The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of removing the debris and garbage from the entire Gulf Coast. The ultimate plan in Mississippi is to burn what's burnable and crush everything else, according to Michael Logue of the Corps of Engineers.

The corps estimates 20 million cubic yards of debris — enough to fill 300 football stadiums 50 feet high — will need to be dealt with in Mississippi. An additional 17 million cubic yards of Louisiana trash must be disposed of, not counting what's scattered across New Orleans — everything from cars crushed by houses to houses destroyed by floodwaters.

The corps has not estimated how much garbage and debris will need to be hauled from New Orleans, where the only city dump was flooded. Debris removal can't even begin in earnest until the city is dry, said Dana Finney, Corps of Engineers spokeswoman in Baton Rouge.

Finney said parish governments ultimately would decide where and how they wanted the rubbish disposed of. There are no plans to let people sort through the garbage to retrieve belongings or important documents.

In Algiers, largely spared by the storm and never flooded, another makeshift dump has sprouted up in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery. The orange upholstered chairs from the city's convention center are mixed in with fly-infested bags of meat and old bread.

Eddie Dahab worked to build a fence around the head-high pile of garbage.

"We're going to make a gate over there for the trucks so nobody can get in there, no humans, no children, because this is contaminated garbage," he said.

Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Gary Estwick and Thomas Fitzgerald contributed to this report.