Cleaning up the aftermath of Sandy
Source: Agencies |
November 18, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
Last summer it was packed with beachgoers, a parking lot where New Yorkers stashed their cars, applied sunscreen and dragged lawn chairs, coolers and umbrellas across the blacktop toward the shore.
Today it's an enormous waste collection site half a mile long and a quarter-mile wide, piled high with debris from the flooding caused by storm Sandy.
Twisted steel, wood, furniture and mattresses fill a parking lot that normally serves one of New York's most popular beaches.
Hundreds of trucks come and go around the clock bringing material collected from the streets of the Far Rockaways and Breezy Point, where water from Sandy's storm surge tore apart homes and buildings. Residents are still digging out.
The temporary dump at Jacob Riis Park in Queens is one of several sites in the city being used this way. Its size reflects the enormity of the damage caused by the storm.
"Our mission is to clear the right of way - sidewalk to sidewalk," said Fred Strickland, the resident engineer from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is helping the New York Department of Sanitation.
By yesterday he expected to have 1,000 vehicles and 4,000 people working on the cleanup.
The debris hauled to the site by the Army Corps is being combed over by workers for the Environmental Protection Agency, then trucked over to Staten Island, put on a barge and floated up the Hudson River to a landfill near Albany.
Instead of sending debris upstate via barge, the sanitation department has been moving it to landfills, including one in Pennsylvania. Citywide, the department said it has collected 250,000 tons of debris.
"It's historic, the tonnage," said Joe Hickey, assistant sanitation chief at the department.
Once the debris is gone, Hickey said the sanitation department will scrub away the last traces of the city dumps.
"When the Department of Sanitation is done, if you didn't know already that this is used the way it's been used, you would never know," he said.
Today it's an enormous waste collection site half a mile long and a quarter-mile wide, piled high with debris from the flooding caused by storm Sandy.
Twisted steel, wood, furniture and mattresses fill a parking lot that normally serves one of New York's most popular beaches.
Hundreds of trucks come and go around the clock bringing material collected from the streets of the Far Rockaways and Breezy Point, where water from Sandy's storm surge tore apart homes and buildings. Residents are still digging out.
The temporary dump at Jacob Riis Park in Queens is one of several sites in the city being used this way. Its size reflects the enormity of the damage caused by the storm.
"Our mission is to clear the right of way - sidewalk to sidewalk," said Fred Strickland, the resident engineer from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is helping the New York Department of Sanitation.
By yesterday he expected to have 1,000 vehicles and 4,000 people working on the cleanup.
The debris hauled to the site by the Army Corps is being combed over by workers for the Environmental Protection Agency, then trucked over to Staten Island, put on a barge and floated up the Hudson River to a landfill near Albany.
Instead of sending debris upstate via barge, the sanitation department has been moving it to landfills, including one in Pennsylvania. Citywide, the department said it has collected 250,000 tons of debris.
"It's historic, the tonnage," said Joe Hickey, assistant sanitation chief at the department.
Once the debris is gone, Hickey said the sanitation department will scrub away the last traces of the city dumps.
"When the Department of Sanitation is done, if you didn't know already that this is used the way it's been used, you would never know," he said.
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