To view: Photos of Kolontar, Hungary, where residents are still coping with the effects of last year & 8217stoxic-waste disaster that released more than a million cubic meters of red sludge and killed ten people.
The nation watched yesterday as fourteen Coal River Mountain residents were arrested and charged with trespassing at a mountaintop removal mine site in West Virginia, in their attempt to draw attention to a possible coal waste dam disaster several times the size of last December's TVA coal ash pond disaster.
To do so in a manner that maximizes sustainability, quality of life, and economic competitiveness they will need a mix of novel approaches to security, energy and water conservation, resource distribution, waste management, disaster management, construction, and transportation.
Poor people scavenging, sorting and selling rubbish to more powerful and affluent middlemen is a common pattern in Bogota, Belo Horizonte, Manila and Jakarta, and all these areas were affected by waste slide disasters in the recent decades.
Anecdotal accounts suggest sorting disaster waste can present complications (e.g., hazardous wastes handling) and can prolong clean-up operations due to double-handling the waste (e.g., taking it to a sorting site and then moving to a permanent disposal site) or sorting material in situ before transportation to disposal sites (Brown et al. 2011a).
The composition and distribution characteristics of building waste in the disaster area are thus described.
Other costs may also result directly or indirectly from a tephra (or any solid disaster waste) clean-up.
Whatever the natural triggers for the waste slide, the disaster cannot be dissociated from the extreme vulnerability of those marginalized people who died and suffered.
Thus, disaster waste management planning (when it is undertaken) is typically included as part of response planning conducted within the readiness phase of the disaster management framework (United States Environmental Protection Agency 2008).
Existing disaster waste plans have mostly focused on hazards such as flooding, extreme weather (e.g., hurricane or tornado) and earthquake-induced debris (e.g., City of Miami 2008; Johnston et al. 2009; City and County of San Francisco 2011).
