What happens when there is no restoration?

[CharlesHarris]

If any government public health or engineering functions remain, there will be an effort to gather and mass incinerate the corpses, probably using air curtain destructors. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers originally developed these for mass cremation after a nuclear war, but today they are very idely used in the forestry industry, as well as for debris cleanups after hurricanes and tsunamis.

A refractory-lined firebox about the size of a railroad car is inserted into a long trench. Combustion of the waste material is initiated with diesel fuel as an accelerant, being poured onto the waste material and the pile ignited. Once the fire has reached suitable strength as to not be blown out by the air curtain, usually 15 to 20 minutes, the blowers are engaged which run steadily throughout the burn operation and the wood is loaded continuously at a rate consistent with the rate of burn and the box towed along the trench as it becomes filled with ash, and the trench backfilled with a large dozer. The machines we used in Mississippi after hurricanes Katrina and Rita would each burn at a rate of over 10 tons per hour and we ran ten such machines simultaneously with a service roadway between each trench row for the dozer, knuckleboom cranes and walking floor transfer trailers bringing in the debris. In the post Katrina and Rita cleanup the site I worked on processed over a million tons of demolition waste and woody materials.

The purpose of the air curtain is to maintain air quality by delaying exit of smoke particles by recirculating them with forced air back into the fire so that smoke particles are subjected to the highest possible burn temperatures, for more complete combustion, reducing particle size to acceptable opacity limits of under 10% per EPA Method 9 Testing (as compared to open burning which typically can run at 80% to 100% opacity).

After Hurricane Floyd in Virginia in 1995 USACE contractors incinerated more than 100,000 drowned hogs in this manner. The ash generated from the most typical wood waste is a useful soil additive. Ash resulting from demolition debris and mixed waste is subject to testing under the toxicity characteristic leeching procedure method to determine if it can be recycled safely, or if it must be disposed of as hazardous material in a composite lined Subtitle D ash fill. Solid waste landfills are diminishing rapidly, and permits are difficult to secure for new sites. Air curtain destruction provides an affordable and environmentally sound alternative to grinding and indiscriminate depositing of debris into landfills.