Yesterday’s diary was about putting people to work. Today’s is about how. The title is the concept, below is the outline.
||Give Them JOBS||
Labor
Construction/disaster cleanup is dirty, thankless, and physically hard. It is also rewarding to look back at the end of a day’s work and see a piece of property ready to be built on.
To repeat the from yesterday’s diary, there are basically two choices here: bring in a damn D-6 @ $150 an hour – plus fuel and rig – and the underground plumbing, the lot, and most of the living vegetation is toast.
Or pay for people over machines. It may take 10 people a full 12-hour day to clear a lot, but there will be no ancillary damage, and 10 people get paid.
+ Waste = Energy
The waste to be removed is damn near immeasurable, and is comprised of almost every known manufactured product used in building and construction. The bad news is some is harmful to humans and other living things.
The good news is that hand removal allows the waste to be sorted. It is labor intensive, but in the long run cost-effective.
A substantial part of that waste will be combustible: trees & brush;lumber, siding, plywood, flooring, cabinets, doors and trim. So turn it into energy.
It will take a huge amount of equipment to reduce the material to compact, easily transported chips, but costs are reduced if that material is burned in local wood-processing plants.
A quick peruse and I found more than one list of wood processing and/or cogeneration sites in a line stretching from West Louisiana to Florida. A call to the DOE’s Alternative Energy folk in Colorado confirmed they have the information resources and wherewithal to initiate contacts through their network of producers.
Long Road
This is one of those rare circumstances when top-down is more effective than horizontal information exchange in the initial phase. DOE + America’s Job Bank + Trade Groups = work for thousands. To reach that level of coordination the effort must begin now.
Helping people does not mean babysitting them. Another example of best intentions out of square to the real need.
Repeating: The people of the Gulf Coast are more than capable, and definitely willing to work to rebuild. Locals know literally every square inch of dirt in the area. You can’t buy that knowledge. And they need the opportunity to rebuild with their own hands.
This concept means replacing heavy equipment with human labor, helping to rebuild the local economy, and generating energy in the process.
If you have good contacts anywhere on the Gulf Coast (one-to-one) you might run the idea by them. I’ve already read posts on Southern blogs that indicate people who are basically homeless, but safe and fed, want to get back to work.
Too many times in past emergencies the locals get told to stand back and watch. The least we can do is try to change that.