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By KRIS HUNDLEY, Times Staff WriterSince the storm, about 30,000 refrigerators have been dumped. They will be dissected, disassembled and crushed for recycling.
NEW ORLEANS - They stand in formation on a sun-struck white gravel pad, surrounded by a fog of flies and emitting a stench that lodges in the back of the throat and clings to the skin.
Two months after Hurricane Katrina, row upon row of water-logged refrigerators, casualties of the storm, are lined up at the Gentilly landfill here on the eastern edge of the city. Dust-churning trucks deliver as many as 3,000 refrigerators and other damaged appliances to the site each day, plucking them from sidewalks, curbs and median strips all over Orleans Parish.
Here, the stinky remnants of the flooding - many wrapped in duct tape and still bearing magnet mementos - are dissected, disassembled and crushed for recycling. The Gentilly dump is used by two of the three companies that have been awarded up to $3-billion in debris-removal contracts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Zephyrhills in Pasco County, and ECC Operating Services of Burlingame, Calif.
In less than three weeks, the 200-acre Gentilly site has processed nearly 60,000 items, including 3,776 freezers, 5,000 stoves, 15,000 washers and dryers and more than 3,000 dishwashers. But it is the refrigerators - 28,734 as of the end of October - that dominate the yard.
Mary Beth Hudson, a spokeswoman for the corps, said it is likely that as many as a quarter-million refrigerators will be hauled to the site in a cleanup operation that could take a year.
"It's going to be an ongoing process as people come back (into the city)," she said. "There's not a definite ending date that I know of."
Each company subcontracts out the work of hauling the white goods to independent drivers whose trucks are rigged with special cranes that pick up and remove the appliances. Once unloaded in Gentilly, the refrigerators are stripped like abandoned cars by workers wearing hard hats, white hazmat suits and respirators.
Specialists with the Environmental Protection Agency siphon and capture the refrigerators' Freon gas. Workers in hard hats flip the appliances on their backs and drain oil from compressors that look like black pumpkins. Then teams of workers with rakes and plastic snow shovels remove food that has been decomposing in the refrigerators since late August. Moldy cakes, rancid meats, rotten poultry and distended soda cans are shoveled into plastic bags, then hauled to another landfill.
After the shelves are removed and the insides hosed with disinfectant, each refrigerator is picked up by a giant crane and crushed in a compactor. The cubes of scrap metal are stacked three stories high, then shipped to a recycler.
As the air hung thick with bottle flies and a sickly sweet stench one recent Saturday, Gentilly's refrigerator crew gathered for lunch under a blue tarp.
Edward Hobson, dust mask hanging from his neck, was handing out apples to a crew of about 70 fellow workers. Hobson said he had come from Memphis by bus two weeks earlier to find Katrina cleanup work.
He was making $14 an hour scooping rotten food out of refrigerators, living in a room with four other workers and taking cold showers.
"The locals call us "white elephants' and complain that we're taking their jobs," Hobson said with a disgust that had nothing to do with the landfill's odor. "But they give locals first priority. And there's plenty of work to do."