Harvey and the Logistics of Recovery

So far, all of the focus has been on rescue and there has been little news about the recovery yet to come. Here are some lessons I saw after Katrina.

White Goods: This is the generic term for large appliances. They will all have to picked up and disposed of. The worst of these will be the refrigerators. Most people, when faced with a refrigerator full of rotten food, will simply duct tape the door shut and drag it to the street. It will be left to the recycler to muck it out. Before it can be crushed, all the refrigerant will need to be removed lest it pollute the air. Imagine doing that to 250,000+ refrigerators.

Cars: After Katrina, the city put out a bid to auto recyclers to collect and crush the thousands of cars that were submerged. There has to be a place to store all these cars (my estimate - 500,000) while they wait to be crushed. Most of them were stored under the elevated highway and they became a magnet for the homeless who lived in them. And before you can crush them, you need to drain the fluids and suck the refrigerant out of the air conditioning system. It is a very labor intensive operation. And I imagine someone had to keep track all the VIN numbers.

Some of the flooded cars will be cleaned up and sold in other parts of the country. Be very cautious if you plan to buy a used car in the next year.

Building Material: The clean up will generate a massive amount of sheetrock, wood scrap, Insulation, furniture and other miscellaneous building materials. These will all have to collected and carted off to a land fill. The debris from Katrina severely stressed the capacity of the local landfill, even after shredding.

The bright spot is that the recovery will generate the need for a lot of low skilled dirty jobs. After Katina, a friend of mine in California complained that all the farm workers were going to Louisiana to find work. One of the things there were doing was mucking out  an industrial freezer in the Port of New Orleans with tons of rotten chicken. My comment was that anytime they preferred to work cleaning out rotten chicken in 100 degree heat to picking apples, they weren't being paid enough.

It will also generate a demand for material for new construction. New Orleans had a very bad experience with Chinese sheetrock. Beware of cheap construction material, especially anything from China.

In New Orleans, they took the park along Westend Blvd and used it store all the trash from the storm. This was an area over 100 feet wide and a couple of miles long. The different categories of trash were stacked 50 feet high while it waited for the shredder. Houston is going to be one giant trash pile for a while.