 |
  |
MISSOURI DIVISION |
|
 |
 |
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
DEBRIS MANAGEMENT BY DAVID CLARK
MR. MOSELEY: The first speaker this morning is David Clark who is the county engineer for Carteret County in North Carolina. David has a B.S. degree in civil engineering from the University of Virginia and a master's in engineering management from George Washington University. He's a registered professional engineer in both Virginia and North Carolina. Dave has more than his share of experience in dealing with hurricanes. He dealt with Bertha and Fran in 1996, Bonnie in 1998 and Dennis and Floyd 1999.
MR. CLARK: When I was first contacted about speaking at an earthquake conference, I had to stop and think why I was asked because in North Carolina we don't know earthquakes.
But in North Carolina we do know debris. I hope to share some of the experiences I've had in the last five years in North Carolina in dealing with massive amounts of debris that can be generated by a natural disaster. This applies whether you're talking about earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Certainly one of the things that we have experienced in the last year with Hurricane Floyd was a tremendous amount of flooding. When you think about the tremendous damage earthquakes can do, dams are susceptible to damage by earthquakes and therefore flooding situations can be created.
One of the problems certainly that we dealt with in North Carolina last year was sort of a Murphy's Law. Anything that could go wrong did go wrong. We have thousands of miles of streams in eastern North Carolina that are still blocked by vegetative debris that was put down by Bertha, Fran, Bonnie, Dennis before Floyd even hit. Then with Dennis, many areas in northeastern North Carolina had 20 inches of rain in the previous 30 days. When the ground is saturated, there is nowhere for that water to go except to run off into the streams and create floods.
I'll talk in general about debris and show you the types of debris that we have with hurricanes.
Onslow County is on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. It's the home to Camp Lejeune that is the largest concentration of United States Marines anywhere in the world. The county itself has a lot of farmland, a barrier island, and resort areas.
In addition to flooding that occurred in downtown Jacksonville that is the county seat, people don't realize how bad flooding can be and they take chances that they shouldn't take.
Crop damage was a major item that we had to deal with. The very specific details of crop insurance is something a lot of people don't know about until the have a problem and realize what it doesn't cover. It's kind of like not having flood insurance and realizing after the fact that normal homeowner's policies don't cover flood damage.
Massive amounts of agricultural damage occurred not just to crops in the fields but to the hog industry, one of the big industries in our county. Thousands of hogs were killed.
This picture was taken on Topsail Island that is our resort area, our barrier island. It shows a 12-foot storm surge going over the island. In many cases where there were low-lying marshy areas that had bridges across them. Those marshy areas became raging torrents and stayed that way for several weeks or even months afterwards because the storm surge cut new inlets through the island. So even though the bridges might have sustained little damage, the approaches were gone and the bridges were no longer available. Fortunately the marines were able to help us out because they provided Humvees, four-wheel drive vehicles. They were able to go up and down the beaches at low tide and crossover areas that were impassable because the roads were damaged so severely. In areas where part of the road survived and part of the road was washed away by the storm surge, it seemed like the side closer to the ocean survived and the side opposite the yellow line got wiped out.
But the biggest amount of damage that we had was due to structures and this consisted of damage not only to RVs, travel trailers and mobile homes, but to stick built structures. Many of those are resort rentals that people buy for investment. Altogether we lost over 400 units. Whether they were mobile or fixed units before, all the resulting debris had to be removed.
Another thing that was devastated was utilities. Now, on a barrier Island, one of the types of debris that we had to deal with that we never thought we would have to deal with was sand. A storm surge washes sand like crazy, wipes out the dune system and spreads it over the rest of the island between the ocean and the inlet. Well, that sand is a very precious resource. In North Carolina, it's illegal to remove sand from a barrier island because that's what the barrier island is. It's sand. So that sand had to be collected and screened and put back along the beach so that it could be used at some future time to restore the dune system.
North Carolina DOD and the towns that are responsible for the roads within their borders, within their city limits hired contractors and they began to remove the sand from the roads so the roads would be passable again. Unfortunately, in many cases they were piling sand up on top of utility lines that had also been devastated. As it happens, in this area, on side of the road sewer, and on the other side of the road is water, so no matter where they put the sand, they were burying utility lines that in many cases were breached by the storm surge. Everywhere that a road was washed out or cut, the utility lines were cut as well.
The police station next to Town Hall of North Topsail Beach was upside down.
At one bridge site, there was a very peaceful quiet marsh where you would likely see water birds and fishing. It became a raging torrent in the hurricane as the storm surge went through and it stayed that way for many months afterwards. In other areas there were inlets that were cut where no inlets had been before. And without a dune system to protect the structures right along the ocean, they were devastated as well.
Hurricane Fran occurred 55 days after Hurricane Bertha. Bertha had removed all the protective structures along the beach and 55 days later there was nothing to stop the storm surge from Fran from going right across the entire island.
Here we have several inches of sand covering city streets that had to be cleared and saved for future use.
Coordination of debris removal after any kind of natural disaster is important with local units of government. You also need a good working relationship with the federal people because no unit of government, whether they're state departments of transportation or local governments are prepared to deal with the massive amount of damage and the debris that has to be removed. The monies just aren't in our local budget. So everyone looks to the federal government...to FEMA under the Stafford Act for reimbursement for their extraordinary costs.
When we cleaned up after Hurricane Bertha in our county, it cost a million and a half dollars. After Hurricane Fran, it cost $15 million: ten times as much. We had to deal with a million cubic yards of debris in our county alone. This consisted of about 200,000 cubic yards of vegetation, 300,000 cubic yards of sand, and half a million cubic yards C and D: construction and demolition debris.
The many different types of damaged structures contained wood, plaster, aluminum, and various types of metals. Many of those stick-built homes that were destroyed contained asbestos. These added another level of environmental screening or sorting of materials from structures that had to be torn down and hauled away.
For my county, the first thing that is important in dealing with debris, is getting the North Carolina DOT involved immediately in picking up debris at the side of the road. Initially this is debris that has ended up within the travel way or within the right-of-way. Basically, this debris is made up of trees and they need to be cleared out preferably within 24 hours in order for emergency vehicles to get through. We want at least one lane of every major road open and as many of the roads going into subdivisions as possible. So this debris is pushed along side the road and DOT comes along and picks it up. In North Carolina when major disasters occur, the State DOT picks up debris for some period of time with certain restrictions. From some storms, it's only been vegetative debris. For other storms it's been incidental construction and demolition debris and small amounts of debris that may be knocked off homes especially those inland homes not damaged by the storm surge.
Another issue that we deal with is the period of time the debris pickup continues. In North Caroline after hurricane Fran, the local units of the NC Department of Transportation in Onslow County was telling their headquarters in Raleigh, that they had picked up all the hurricane debris. This was in late November and December. But they were told to continue with the pick up. After the first of January, I suggested to the State DOT that they put a notice in the paper telling people that they should remove the ornaments from their trees before putting them within the highway right of way. Yes, they were getting Christmas trees put out after the first of January because the debris pick up order was still in effect.
It's important to know that vegetative debris is handled in one way and construction type debris is handled in another way. So you have to decide it the two need to be separated or can be commingled.
Appliances are another special debris item. When a refrigerator spends several days under two or three feet of water, you might as well put it beside the road if you can get it there because there is no way you can fit it. This is what we call "white goods"...washers, refrigerators dryers, and freezers that we handle separately.
Another issue that we need to deal with is hazardous wastes. A lot of people don't think about it, but just about everybody has hazardous waste in our homes. They're small quantities and according to EPA regulations, you're allowed to put those in a municipal or private subtitle D landfills. However, when you have a large natural disaster that devastates hundreds of homes, you're talking about large quantities of hazardous materials such as cleaning solutions, paints, insecticides, and herbicides that keep your garden and house looking good.
The final key issue is disposal sites. Where are you going to put all this waste material once you've picked it up? In North Carolina, the local government units have the responsible for setting up temporary debris disposal sites. There is an acronym that has come into use in the last few years. It is TDSRS or Temporary Debris Storage and Reduction Sites. With vegetative debris, you're going to pick it in the state in which people put it out. So you're loading large sections of trees, small twigs, and anything a person can get to the side of the road. After loading, you transport it to a centralized site. Once it gets there, it is reduced in size and either incinerated in a pit burner or chipped up for hauling away to its final disposal site; you've reduced its volume.
Chipping can reduce the vegetative debris by about 75 percent: a four to one reduction. You end up with about a quarter of the volume you started with.
If you pit burn, unfortunately in a lot of coastal areas, that's not an option. It's hard to get a Temporary PD to burn material when the groundwater table is two feet below the surface. An option is building a refractory pit above the ground where you bring in furnace type walls and everything is above the original grade. This is a more expensive way to go. These sites have to be approved in North Carolina by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Solid-Waste Division. They have very strict standards In setting up these sites.
Again, segregation of debris material is very important. You can´t burn everything.
It's important to know whether you're going to own these sites or lease them. If you lease them for a year or six months, then at the end of that lease, you have to restore the site to the condition in which it was in before you occupied it. You have to take soil samples and groundwater samples to establish the baseline for comparing the before and after conditions. You need to document everything: take photographs and keep records of the soil and water sample test results.
Next you have to prepare the site and make sure there is adequate access. If you have a hurricane and flooding, most of your low-lying areas are going to be wet. So you've got to make sure the public and contractors are going to be able to get in and out of these sites without encountering soft ground.
Signage is needed so people know where the sites are and you have to have restrictions on access so that when a site isn't open to the public, nobody can get in.
Because the last thing you want is to have a lot of debris dumped when the site is unattended. You need to be accountable for tracking and documenting how much goes into the dump in order to support any reimbursement for the Federal government. You may be getting a lot of things you don´t want and shouldn´t take.
There is a tendency for people to clean out their sheds and garages after a storm even though they did not have any storm-related damage. They just use the opportunity to dump for free all the accumulated stuff that they have collected over the years.
And of course, you have to have a site restoration plan. You have to know before you open a site exactly what you're going to do to restore it when you close it. You need heavy equipment at that site to maintain your debris piles. You can fill up several acres in a hurry if you're only end dumping two or three feet high and not managing the piles properly. So you to have to keep that material piled up as you go to have continuous and safe access by the public, contractors, and your local government agencies.
These piles can get pretty big quickly. We've talked about the issue of who's picking up vegetative debris and whether you chip it or burn it. If you can find a customer for your chips, then the chips become useful. In the area around New Bern, North Carolina, Craven County, just north of where we are, there is a power plant that basically burns junk. It burns wood scrap from paper mills and a lot of different types of materials. It´s a good customer for wood chips.
Unfortunately after Hurricane Fran, when 55 counties were declared a disaster area, hundreds of thousands of trees that were down and that power plant couldn't handle the tremendous volume of chips. Many areas had to turn to burning which gives you about a 90 percent reduction in the volume. The ash that you get, if it's operated properly, represents about 10 percent of the original volume of vegetation.
The location for burners is important. They have to be in areas where the smoke isn't going to affect residential areas or highways. You don't want thick smoke blowing over highways, restricting vision, and causing accidents.
Then you have to determine the volume of residue you're going to have and what you're going to do with that. Is there a landfill within a reasonable distance that you can haul that ash to and are they willing to accept it?
Vegetation will pile up in a hurry, so it's important to be constantly reducing it. Tub grinders rather than chippers will be used because you will be handling some pretty good-sized pieces of wood. One or two large tub grinders will be most likely needed.
Unfortunately, we didn't buy one so we don't own one. We contracted for the use of one. They're very high-maintenance and very hard to keep running for a length of time without taking them down for major maintenance.
Handling construction and demolition debris is another issue. Certainly in earthquakes, you're going to be dealing with not only unusable highways and bridges, but in many communities there are going to be large quantities of structures that are going to be destroyed as well.
We had a contract for basically a turnkey operation. Our contractor knocked the homes down, loaded them on a truck, and hauled them at that time about 100 miles to the nearest Subtitle D landfill. Disposal sites are another issue. Our county now has its own landfill. Many counties project their landfill needs over a five-year period. They look at what their normal generation rates are and build their landfill cells to meet this amount of debris: the amount of solid waste their citizens generate. A major disaster can generate a year or more of debris in a heartbeat. A local government unit, even if they will be reimbursed for that volume in their landfill, may not want to give it up because that means they have got one year less volume for their domestic waste. If they use their landfill, that may put them behind the construction curve in meeting their future waste disposal needs.
Asbestos handling and disposal is another issue. Normally when you tear down a single home, you have an industrial hygienist go in and take samples of wall material, siding material, and insulation to determine if there are asbestos components. With hundreds of destroyed homes that have to be hauled away, the State of North Carolina decided that there was no way that a house-by-house process would be fast enough. So they developed a shortcut that was only usable after Hurricane Fran. The damaged houses were soaked with water, knocked down, loaded onto trucks, soaked a second time, and covered for the 100-mile journey to the landfill. When the loads were uncovered, they soaked a third time before they were dumped on the ground at that landfill. This whole process had to be worked out between the various local and state environmental agencies because they're the ones that had to determine what type of protective measures were required for handling asbestos.
And finally, you have to decide whether you want to haul this debris to a temporary disposal site or haul it directly to the nearest Subtitle D landfill or licensed facility.
The only thing I can compare all of this damage to is a war zone. And when I stood on the beach a day and a half after Hurricane Fran, all I could were mile after mile after mile of foundations and chimneys where homes once stood along the beach.
I have never been a person that really craved the beach like a lot of people do, but my heart went out to these people whose homes were not even safe to go in to get their personal belongings out. It´s very similar to the type of damage you're going to see in an earthquake in a major urban area. It's not going to be a lot different except there won't be a wall of water from the storm surge.
In hurricanes secondary and tertiary damage occurs when first row beach houses turn into lethal missiles to the second and third and fourth rows. The storm surge, bricks, mortar, 2X4´s, and other building components fly right into the other houses. This causes a lot of damage to the next row and the next row and the next row. And in some cases, large amounts of debris were carried across miles of water into the next row of islands. One house ended up on the water and we had to demolish it and had it hauled away by barge.
Rules for dealing with hurricane debris management petty much apply to any kind of debris. However, we found in 1996, that even though we thought we knew how to deal with debris, we didn´t when it came to FEMA. We had Hurricane Bertha in July and 55 days later we had Hurricane Fran. In preparing for the 1996 Olympic games we had two FEMA regions working our area. In July of 1996 we worked with FEMA Region 6 from Denton, Texas and after Fran hit, 55 days later, we were dealing with the FEMA Region 4 folks from Atlanta. We were dealing with a different group of people. We learned, much to our dismay, that the Robert T. Stafford Act provides FEMA with a lot of discretionary empowers to do what they do. In most instances the regional director of FEMA, may do this or may do that. So even though there are some basic policies and procedures that FEMA operates under, different regions do things differently. It is important to understand this so don't assume anything. Get with the FEMA people who come to help you the day they walk in the door. Make sure they know what your needs are and make sure you know how they expect you to deal with them. Whether it's a lump sum contract or unit price contract, how do you go about contracting? After Hurricane Fran, the North Carolina DOT found out very quickly that even with as many people and trucks that they had, they were not able to handle all the debris that was generated. So they began to contract with private contractors. These contracts were also used by local governments and became bones of contention: a real problem.
Make sure that you've got FEMA approval on all of your contracts before you spend any money.
The final thing that you do is document, document, and document. You can't have enough documentation. If you hire a contractor to operate the debris site, you have your own people or an independent contractor keep track of everything that comes in so there is no question about how much debris was brought in by that particular contractor on that particular day. Because if you're paying them on a cubic yard basis based by truck load, somebody needs to be there to make sure that not only did that truck come in 20 times that day, but that all 20 times it was full.
So those are the important things that you need to keep in mind. There is an excellent course that FEMA teaches at Emmitsburg, Maryland. They have also taught it the last few years at the national hurricane conference that takes place either on the Atlantic Coast in Florida or on the Gulf Coast. They rotate the site every few years. If you foresee you may have some involvement in debris management after a natural disaster, it would behoove you to make sure you know the current FEMA doctrine before you get involved in that process. Thank you very much for your time.
MR. MOSELEY: Any questions?
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Has the armed forces ever been used to help clean up an area?
MR. CLARK: Well, my experience has been no. You would think with 42,000 marines at Camp Lejeune, the answer might be yes, but you have to remember that that hurricane went through Camp Lejeune as well. Camp Lejeune was dealing with the same types of problems as we were. Camp Lejeune is not only a training base boot camp but it is the engineer school for the marines. The heavy equipment maintenance school is there. After any hurricane, they have to get their schools back up and running so they can get back on schedule. They also have a lot of troops that are deployed to points all over the world. So the folks that are left behind and awaiting their deployment are pretty much involved in cleaning up the base. After Hurricane Fran, the Corps of Engineers did get involved in contracting for clean up within incorporated areas. The DOT in North Carolina handled the counties, the unincorporated areas, and the Corps of Engineers offered their assistance to cities and towns that needed help in cleaning up. They did do a lot of clean up in many of the towns that had skeletal public works department. But to my knowledge at least in North Carolina, the military has not become involved like they have this year in fighting forest fires. We recently had marines from Camp Lejeune go to Montana to help fight the forest fires.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: As far as removing the homes that were not within the street right of way, were the property owners held responsible for the cost? Did you try to get recovery from them?
MR. CLARK: No, we didn't. We had every property owner sign a form that included four elements. First was a hold harmless provision that each property owner agreed to. If our contractor damaged their water connection or did some damage to their septic tank, the county and our contractor would not be liable. Each property owner also agreed to rebuild on that site after it was cleared off.
Secondly, they also agreed to turn over any insurance reimbursement for demolition to the State if they received any funds. And I dare say that if you get your homeowner's policy and read through it, it includes nothing in there about demolishing or removing your home. Most homeowner's insurance policies do not include that. So we didn't recover anything from the homeowners.
They also had to provide a notarized a statement that they actually were the owner of the house and they also had to give the right of access.
We had to go onto a lot of private property. So we had to get (1) the right of access, (2) hold harmless provision, (3) a statement of ownership and (4) duplication of benefits statement that turned over insurance reimbursement to the State. FEMA requires all four of these to be in the two-page form each property owner had to sign before we could even send a contractor on their property.
MR. MOSELEY: Any other questions?
FROM THE AUDIENCE: I'm a traffic engineer that works in North Carolina just south of where Mr. Clark's talking about. Our North Carolina emergency response manual contains all those FEMA regulations. It's current as of within the past 30 days and it's very detailed. It's invaluable and what Mr. Clark is telling you is the absolute truth. You really need to know the rules before you get into the game.
MR. MOSELEY: Very good. Thank you.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: During our experiences on earthquakes, we had federal-aid highways where we could get emergency relief funds under Title 23. However, the locals were moving material off private land and dumping it in the right-of-way. So of course, this did not make CALTRANS very happy when FHWA said that's not an emergency relief problem but a FEMA problem. So I think I want to echo, that you've got to know the rules of the game when you get in it and documentation is a key.
MR. CLARK: Absolutely. I hope I have helped you a little bit to mentally prepare you for what hopefully you will never have to go through. It is kind of like an umbrella, the knowledge is better to have and not need than to need and not have. Thank you.
 |
Send mail to scott.holder@fhwa.dot.gov with questions or comments about this web site. |
