Effective Debris Management For A Resilient Community

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for effectively removing debris from a community after a natural disaster for expediting the community recovery. Natural disasters have a very high physical impact on communities that generate a huge volume of debris. The amount of debris is almost five to ten times higher than the annual solid waste volume in a community, and causes considerable debris removal challenges. Also, slow debris removal hinders both an emergency response and a recovery process. This framework for an effective debris management system is based on the interrelationship between critical infrastructure systems (i.e. civil, civic and social) and capacity that would enable a community to effectively remove debris in a post-disaster situation. This research focuses on the impact of the three infrastructure systems on debris management with respect to general debris removal procedure: generation, collection, transportation, process and disposal. A debris manager would benefit from this research for analyzing the existing debris management system in a community and capacities required to improve the resilience of a community with respect to debris management. This evaluation also suggests that infrastructure capacity needs to amplify the performance of debris management in a community.