(cont)


Simply getting an agreement from the Army Corps on the exact wording for the legal release document that residents must sign to authorize contractors to clear their homes took several weeks, officials said.

Then the Army Corps and its federal partners repeatedly gave new demands, such as satellite-based measurements on the location of each house, before large-scale clearing could start, county officials said.

[Michael H. Logue, an Army Corps spokesman, said last week that the desire to hire local subcontractors had often meant working with smaller, Mississippi-based companies without a large supply of heavy-duty equipment, slowing progress at times. The possibility that human remains may be mixed in with debris has also slowed the cleanup. "If you are going to do it right and you are going to do it safe and in way that helps the victims and makes it obvious that you care about them, you can't just go in there with a heavy hand and lots of steam," he said.]

As the demands grew, the amount of debris being cleared each day in Jackson County dropped to about 12,000 cubic yards a day from 75,000 cubic yards a day, according to local officials.

"There was just so much bureaucracy, so many levels of approvals, that nobody seemed to be able to make a decision and get things done," said Manly Barton, president of the Jackson County Board of Supervisors.

Benny Rousselle, president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, said he had encountered the same problems. Even though a house may be about to collapse and its owner has approved its demolition, the federal government requires rigorous structural, historical and environmental evaluations of each property before the Army Corps will take it down, Mr. Rousselle said.

"There are so many monitors, so much overhead, it is really slowing this down," he said.

Impatient Plaquemines officials have hired their own contractors to start doing the work, Mr. Rousselle said. They have cleaned up about 600 of the approximate 6,000 damaged or destroyed properties. The corps had not cleared a single house, he said.

By any measurement, the cleanup work caused by Hurricane Katrina is the most complex and far-reaching disaster recovery in United States history.

In the aftermath of the storm, 88 million cubic yards of debris - including tree limbs, furniture, refrigerators and shredded pieces of whole houses - were strewn across Mississippi and Louisiana, enough to fill nearly nine million dump trucks. Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992, then the most destructive on record, generated 14 million cubic yards of debris.

Federal officials declined to release any data that would allow a direct comparison of the cost of the Army Corps cleanup versus work done directly for local governments, saying it was proprietary. All that they would release is a $2.2 billion estimate for the Army Corps' share of the work, which covers about half of the debris in Mississippi and two-thirds in Louisiana.

But a survey by The New York Times of the governments on the Mississippi coast that have hired their own contractors found an average price of $14 a cubic yard. All but one community had secured a lower price than the $17 to $19 per cubic yard that the corps charges, which does not include disposal or other overhead. The Army Corps has also nearly 800 employees supervising cleanup and has paid as many as 300 inspectors a rate of $55.79 an hour to monitor the work by the private contractors.

The Army Corps work has won some praise. Homes are often cleared one at a time, instead of entire streets at once, so property owners, like Yvette Gonzales, 76, of Bay St. Louis, can be there to watch. Mrs. Gonzales even requested that the crew search for a handmade quilt that had special meaning to her family. The quilt never turned up, but the crew found the tiny wedding cake statue that Mrs. Gonzales had saved since her marriage in 1949.

"It brings it all back," said Mrs. Gonzales, whose husband died nine years ago. "It makes you remember those good times."

In some cases, the corps takes extra steps that add to the cost of the work and the time it takes to complete it. For example, the Army Corps contractors who are working to remove the thousands of refrigerators and other appliances left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina operate much differently than private contractors.

In Hancock County, Miss., where the Army Corps is in charge, contractors in protective suits carefully open refrigerators and meticulously clean them out, sanitizing the interiors with a cleaning solution. Workers remove Freon gas. Quality-control supervisors watch every step. Army Corps officials would not say how much the operation costs, but in Louisiana they are paying more than $1.8 million to process and dispose of these so-called white goods.

In neighboring Harrison County, once the refrigerators are dropped off at a landfill, the government's financial obligation ends. A recycling contractor, eager to get the scrap metal, removes the Freon. In most cases, the spoiled food is removed by lifting the refrigerator atop a lined dumpster and shaking it. No biohazard suits are involved.

Some local officials said they were glad that the Army Corps was spending the extra time and money.

"Twenty years from now I don't want young mothers giving birth to kids with birth defects because we found out we did not do proper dumping," said Representative Gene Taylor, a Democrat from Bay St. Louis, Miss., where the Army Corps is in charge of cleaning up.

Mr. Worley, from the Army Corps, said that if the agency was handling the cleanup any differently, it would also get criticized.

"Over the years we have gotten hammered for the opposite," he said. "We are doing it the way we are supposed to do it and, yes, it takes time. And it costs money, absolutely."

But John Record, a manager from Custom Recycling of Cody, Wyo., a private contractor that is processing refrigerators in Harrison County, said he was convinced that his cheaper approach was environmentally friendly, with state and federal inspectors checking regularly to ensure that.

"It's like killing a fly with a sledgehammer," Mr. Record said of the Army Corps' approach. "They seem to have an unlimited budget, so I guess they can do it that way.