Hurricane debris will create waste-disposal problems

Today’s question: What will happen to the tons and tons of debris from the destruction of buildings and cars from the hurricanes? Can the wood be recycled? What about the furniture, glass, steel and concrete? Do they scrap all the cars? Can any of these things be recycled or will this fill up or create landfills?

This, as you might imagine, is somewhat of a problem. We’ve all seen those images of streets in Texas and Florida lined with huge piles of ruined carpet, drywall, lumber, furniture and so on and so forth. It is maybe hard for us here on the desert to grasp the enormity of all at. The costs are in the billions.

You can’t just dig a big hole in the ground and bury all that stuff. Flood water is contaminated with God knows what and that means all that soaked trash is toxic, too.

So they will have to find or create safe, lined landfills for all that stuff to keep it from contaminating the groundwater for years to come.

It all gets pretty complicated. I refer you to this recent lengthy and informative Wired article for more information than I can give you here: wired.com/story/where-dothey-put-all-that-toxic-hurricanedebris.

When the islands were devastated by the hurricane what happened to the birds? Were they just blown out to sea and died?

Maybe.

Some probably sensed the storm coming and fled to safety before it hit. Some certainly found shelter some place, just like people did. Some probably were killed outright by the storm and some might die off or at least be severely diminished by habitat loss.