[StBernard] HAUL PASS

[Westley Annis]

HAUL PASS
Working after dusk speeds up debris collection in New Orleans area 
Sunday, September 24, 2006
By Meghan Gordon

pink-and-orange sun descending behind mounds of debris signals the start of
a new shift at a St. Bernard Parish site collecting the detritus of flooded
houses before the shards reach their permanent resting spot in a West Bank
landfill. 

Carting off Hurricane Katrina's wreckage is an around-the-clock business
these days, with some haulers coming out only after twilight. 

Transfer trailers at least three times larger than the daytime trucks that
pluck piles from curbsides start loading at the St. Bernard site at 5:30
p.m. They wait for monitors perched in observation towers to signal the
start of the dusk-till-dawn stream to an Avondale landfill half an hour
later. 

 
A few hours into the shift, the trailers trek nearly 30 miles one way, back
and forth across nearly deserted highways to the private West Bank landfill
taking in a significant share of metro New Orleans' hurricane debris. 

River Birch, the U.S. 90 dump owned by Jefferson Parish Councilwoman
Jennifer Sneed's husband and father-in-law, credits the night operations
with speeding up what's certain to be years of storm disposal and making
roads safer for daytime drivers, a claim echoed by Jefferson Parish
politicians and Waggaman residents. 

Night haulers from the St. Bernard transfer station alone -- the only such
processing facility still open -- have ferried as many as 1 million cubic
yards of shredded debris, said Rich Riccelli, vice president of Riccelli
Trucking, a subcontractor handling the operation for Unified Recovery Group.


Short haulers dump their curbside collections at the transfer site all day.
They scatter each load on the ground for excavators to knock through in
search of hazardous materials not allowed in the landfill -- refrigerators,
steel, mattresses. 

"You wouldn't imagine. I've seen cars," Mike Richard of Unified Recovery
Group said, looking up at a towering pile with small machines like
lawnmowers and a scooter. "That looks like a transmission." 

The picked-through debris then meets a shredder that reduces its bulk by
two-thirds, enough to stuff the wreckage of an average house into one
transfer trailer bed. Backhoes pile it into long rows a few dozen feet high,
where it awaits the stream of trailers flowing into the site after
nightfall. 

At the Avondale landfill, the "walking floor" trailers -- named for their
hydraulic slats that shove their loads out the back -- drive up and down the
growing hill of construction debris, dumping an average of 95 cubic yards
per truckload, compared with the daytime trucks' average 31 cubic yards,
said Mack Mandell, River Birch general manager. 

The nighttime trucks account for 10 percent of the 478 average daily loads
dumped at River Birch, and yet they haul in nearly a third of the average
daily volume of 18,000 cubic yards. 

Waggaman resident Freddie Sanchez has plenty of gripes about short haulers
and F350s with attached trailers barreling past his house on Willswood Lane.
But he doesn't have a problem navigating around the larger trucks on U.S. 90
on his way home from a night shift at the Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve
Base in Belle Chasse. 

"There's not as many of them, and they're not trying to beat each other out
as far as getting to the landfill and back," Sanchez said. "There's no rat
race, or rush, going back and forth." 

At the St. Bernard collection point, incongruous items -- a naked Barbie
doll, a tattered blue tarpaulin -- lay tangled together in the seemingly
endless piles awaiting their final trip to the landfill. 

"You see everybody's lives here," Riccelli said. "Everybody's secrets that
they never wanted found. We've found them." 

. . . . . . . 

Meghan Gordon can be reached at mgordon at timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3785.