Driving Force

Hurricane Katrina left no shortage of destruction when it cut across the Gulf Coast in 2005. In the massive cleanup effort that followed, those trying to get the streets of New Orleans—one of the areas hardest hit by the storm—back to normal had their work cut out for them.

The storm and receding floodwaters left ruined homes, downed trees and thousands of cubic yards of construction and demolition debris in their wake, as well as people’s possessions, including thousands of abandoned automobiles.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and DRC Inc., a Mobile, Ala.-based contractor, have begun the rather arduous task of collecting, cataloguing, tracking, remediating and crushing the abandoned vehicles left in Katrina’s wake. As of late June, the DEQ and DRC working together have towed more than 11,000 cars to staging areas for processing.

LEGALESE. Collecting and processing that many vehicles under the best of circumstances would be no small feat, and the operation undertaken in New Orleans has been all the more complicated in the general confusion following such a disastrous event.

"The challenges were not in the physical collection of the vehicles," says

Notification turned out to be one of the biggest challenges through the whole process, Prieur says. The company had to notify the abandoned cars’ former owners and make sure they were aware their cars were tagged for scrap and give the owners a chance to reclaim them. "We’re collecting people’s personal property," he says. "The state has regulations about notifying the owner—there’s a whole process."

The process was made all the more difficult considering the large number of New Orleans’ population that fled the city in the immediate aftermath of the storm and had not returned. "The state was concerned over whether they were meeting the requirements of notification," Prieur says. "Most of these people weren’t living at the address where the car was registered. Who’s to say whether they were being notified?"

Rodney Mallet from the DEQ echoes his sentiment: "There were lots of legalities. The system is designed for registered vehicles, and many of these were not."

The company also had problems with stolen vehicles, and conversely, more automobiles showing up in areas that had already been cleared, says Mallet. "We’d tow from a spot, and it’d be cleared, and then there would be new cars there the next day," he recalls.

It has taken some legal wrangling to make the collection process run more smoothly. The local government made some changes to assist with the issue of notification—extending the required time period. "The normal process was a 45-day process," Prieur says. "We held some vehicles up to a year. The state did something legislatively to determine that if somebody hadn’t claimed [cars] in two years, it was determined that they didn’t want them."

To curb the appearance of yet more vehicles in already cleared spaces, the contract needed some tweaking as well, says Mallet. The original contract called for cars to be picked up from the public rights of way first. "In many cases, the adjacent property owner would bring them out to the public right of way so they could be tagged later by the state police and hauled off," says Mallet. "We modified the contract to allow the contractor to pick up on private property when he had right of entry. Owners could call and give us permission to come pick up a vehicle."

Automobiles weren’t the only vehicles left behind in the storm’s wake. In the busy port city of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina also wreaked havoc on harbors, leaving hundreds of boats. (See sidebar, "Sea Worthy," on p. 106 of this feature.) The process of removing these vessels from the city’s harbors came with its own set of challenges.

For New Orleans’ abandoned automobiles, once the red tape was adequately navigated, the contractor could begin the remediation process.

SAFE HANDLING. All the cars picked up by the DEQ and DRC will be processed for scrap, according to Mallet.

"We were not given an option to do anything other than scrap them," says Prieur. "[The state] didn’t want anything to end up back in circulation, so we were simply to collect them and store them." He adds that while certain components on the cars might have had some resale value, many of these vehicles sat submerged under floodwaters for two or even three weeks, making the scrap market the most likely choice.

The remediation process itself is fairly straightforward and takes about 20 minutes per car, says Mallet.

A telehandler picks up the vehicle and sets it on a rack, says Prieur. The fluids—oil, transmission—are then drained, and the batteries and catalytic converts are removed, as are mercury switches. All the hazardous materials are removed by certified handlers, he says. Trunks are also examined for dangerous materials, like propane tanks and gas cans, adds Mallet.

As for the mercury switches specifically, Prieur says a separate company was responsible for their collection and proper disposal after removal. "That was set up so those mercury switches weren’t thrown into the garbage," he says. "They sent out bins and came to pick them up."

With the contract being administered by the DEQ, environmental protection throughout the remediation process was a top priority, says Prieur.

"After collection, we made sure they weren’t leaking anything before storage," he says. "During remediation, there were substantial precautions taken," he adds, including containment walls around the staging facility. The work was also all done on concrete, and covers were available to protect the ground from potentially damaging runoff.

The original plan called for the collection period to end June 30, but the sheer volume of vehicles dictated a 30-day extension of that deadline. As of the writing of this article at the end of July, the company was still collecting and processing automobiles. Prieur says DRC hopes to have the crushing of the cars completed within 90 days, and once the cars have been crushed, the company will be looking to auction off the crushed automobiles to scrap recyclers.

More information about the collection and remediation efforts of the Louisiana DEQ and its partner DRC, as well as other projects, is available online at www.deq.louisiana.gov.