Haiti Faces Colossal And Costly Cleanup Before İt Can Rebuild

The task of knocking down, smashing apart and hauling away the mountain range of rubble left by the Jan. 12 earthquake will take years and cost as much as $1 billion, according to some estimates.

"I have heard the president say that based on what the engineers tell him, it will take 1,000 dump trucks working for 1,000 days to clear away the debris, and I am not sure even the experts know how big is the pile," said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and diplomat who is leading the effort to plan Haiti's reconstruction.

What the experts do know is that the rubble is very heavy and very much in the way. U.N. rapid assessment teams estimate that the 245,000 ruined or hopelessly damaged structures in Haiti will produce 30 million to 78 million cubic yards of broken blocks, twisted metal and pulverized concrete -- enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome, from playing field to roof, up to 17 times.

U.S. contractors with experience clearing Baghdad after bombings and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina recognize that there are fortunes to be made moving Haiti's debris from point A to point B. They are scrambling to partner with local construction firms to secure access to workers and heavy equipment and to align themselves with the Haitian business leaders who have connections to the government and the international donor consortiums that will write the big checks. When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met recently with Haiti's president, René Préval, the two discussed rubble removal and what Brazilian companies could offer, according to a participant in the meeting.

Préval might have been overly optimistic about the 1,000 days. If a Mack truck can haul about nine cubic yards of concrete debris, the cleanup could require as many as 8 million trips -- through the snarl of downtown Port-au-Prince's narrow streets to the still-nonexistent dumps and recycling centers at the city's edge.

How long did it take to remove the twin towers after 9/11? It took them two years, and that was in New York City, and it cost a lot of money. We are Port-au-Prince, and our government doesn't have any money," said Philippe Cineas, director general of Haiti Blocs, a concrete-block maker and construction company that has cleared rubble from five sites, including a bank "where we had to work very slowly, very carefully, because they were looking for the vault."