This is great news and allows more people access to the (former) home sites and clearing of the non-toxic debris.
This seems almost a fantastical number. If my math is correct, this is roughly 30 days for 300 M tons…or 10M tons per day. A typical dump truck can carry 6-7 tons, so maybe you get ~5 tons of oddly packed debris per load. Or 2M truck loads per day. And this doesn’t count construction debris. Even if a truck could carry out 10 loads per day that is 200K trucks in use. OK, maybe some trucks can can carry 2-4 times as much. That is a lots of trucks.
And where did they put all that waste?
My pure guess is that they had to remove a lot of contaminated soil. Soil packs really well, so I’d continue that guess by saying that the trucks were mostly at their weight limit rather than at their cubic capacity limit.
Still a huge figure requiring a huge number of truck loads by any measure.
Edit: I wouldn’t be surprised if someone slipped a couple of zeros in that figure - 300 million pounds seems more likely.
The more I look, the more sure I am that the 300 million tons is wrong.
There were something like 11000 homes destroyed in the two fires, plus apartments and businesses. Let’s round it to 20,000 properties.
300 million tons divided by 20,000 properties would be 15,000 tons per property. That’s just ridiculously huge. An entire electric vehicle is 2 or 3 tons. Only the batteries (and perhaps some of the fluids) are hazardous materials. There’s simply no way there is 15,000 tons of contaminated soil per property. But I’d buy 15,000 pounds.
Soil runs about a ton per cubic yard. 15,000 pounds would be around 7 or 8 cubic yards. Maybe only 4 or 5 yards if the soil is really wet (like it might be after a rain.) I’d buy that. A conservative removal of contaminates will end up taking a significant margin of uncontaminated soil just to be sure you’ve got all of the hazardous materials that have leached into the soil.
With that adjustment, now we’re talking about one dump truck per property. That seems far more reasonable.
Exactly. I even know the dump they were using, and I doubt it could handle that much traffic.
More and more people and reporters are innumerate. They lack enough practical experience with physical reality to properly vet what they are being told or inventing.