Deconstructing disaster: Economic and environmental impacts of deconstruction in post-Katrina New Orleans

Abstract

Within weeks of the 2005 hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, along the Gulf region of the United States, Mercy Corps implemented a deconstruction program to reclaim building material from some of the 275,000 destroyed homes. In contrast to machine demolition where massive flows of construction debris are directed into landfills, hand deconstruction of buildings diverts materials out of landfills by redirecting them back into reuse or recycling. This study reports findings of reclaimed material from four deconstructed houses. Over 20,000 data points revealed salvage rates of 38–75% of the buildings by weight. A total of 44 tons of material was redirected back into the local building material stream (enough to build three new homes out of the four that came down). This included 32,342 board feet of reusable lumber among the $60,000 worth of products returned to a devastated local economy. In this study the cost/profit of deconstruction varied from a net cost of $3.80 to a net profit of $1.53 per square foot. This compares to an estimated net cost of demolition at a steady $5.50 per square foot. Also, deconstruction in post-disaster New Orleans revealed better efficiency of labor than in previous non-disaster situated studies. This report includes a review of scholarly and non-scholarly literature in the deconstruction field to provide a snapshot of the emerging industry. This report is one of two sponsored by Mercy Corps on the use of deconstruction in post-disaster New Orleans. The companion study (Denhart, 2009) conducted as a phenomenology examined the psycho-social impact of deconstruction in disaster response. These two studies support the use of deconstruction among countries seeking to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals of reducing the human and environmental impact of disasters by 2015.