Natural Disasters generate an overwhelming amount of debris. If you’ve never seen it for yourself, it can be truly difficult to imagine the feeling you get driving down roads piled high with downed trees and flooded household items left by tired homeowners for FEMA to pick up. To put it in perspective, let’s examine the debris load after Hurricane Helene.
Hurricanes Leave Behind Too Much Debris for Landfills
Buncombe County is located in North Carolina and covers about 657 square miles, which looks like this:
Image courtesy of Google Maps
In comparison, note the map showing the resulting power outages from the storm; this is a good way of understanding which areas in the path of the storm suffered substantial damage.
In Buncombe County alone, around 3.5 million cubic yards (almost 500,000 tons) of tree debris were removed- and 405,187.30 cubic yards (equivalent to just over four football fields, 66 feet in depth) were removed from just one town in the county, Biltmore Forest.
Using a standard, 20-cubic-yard dump truck, it would take 175,000 loads to remove all of this debris.
Biltmore Forest (not even all of Buncombe County) spent $9,349,558 on debris removal, which was just short of $300,000 less than their overall recovery expenditure, and comes out to a cost of $23.07 per cubic yard, or $461.49 per standard 20-cubic-yard dump truck.
Figures herein are from this report from Biltmore Forest
Meanwhile, the City of Saint Petersburg is 61.1 square miles. For reference, that much land area looks like this:
Following the back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the City of St Petersburg collected a staggering 2.1 million cubic yards of debris (about 291,667 tons or 105,000 standard 20-cubic-yard dump truck loads). Although just a little under one-tenth the size of Buncombe County, St Petersburg was left with well over half of the same amount of debris.
Many times, the wood debris from hurricanes and similar natural disasters are either chipped or dumped into landfills. Landfills and mulching yards fill up quickly, and then what?
Air Curtain Burners Solve the Debris Problem After Natural Disasters
The sheer volume of vegetative debris after hurricanes demands the use of air curtain burners. Here’s how:
Debris Volume Reduction
Air curtain burners reduce debris volume by 97%, freeing up much-needed space after natural disasters. Comparatively, grinding debris only reduces the overall volume of the debris by around 30%. Why is that number so small? Well, some materials, like branches, have a lot of air space and are very bulky, so these items will condense and the debris volume will reduce significantly. However, tree trunks and stumps are not bulky and full of air; they are very dense. Grinding them actually increases their overall volume since it now introduces air space. If landfills have to house all of the debris, they will fill up very quickly- even if the debris has been or will be ground. Air curtain burners’ ability to reduce debris volume by around 97% makes it necessary to natural disaster clean-up efforts.
High-Production
Air Curtain Burners are high-production machines. Just one of these machines burns through 40 or more dump truck loads per day ~ and that number can climb when you bring in multiple machines. One excavator can feed up to 4 machines, meaning that in a single place and with a single excavator, 160 standard dump truck loads, or 3200 cubic yards of debris can be processed in just one day. Air curtain burners’ ability to maintain such high production makes it a perfect debris solution after natural disasters.
Air Quality & Fire Risk Protection
Although air curtain burners are high-production machines, this is not why many local governments require their use when burning debris. The most amazing aspect of the air curtain burner is its ability to control and contain an extremely productive fire while protecting the surrounding air and environment. Having open fires could drastically impede visibility, harm air quality, and make living nearby very uncomfortable- not to mention it could pose a huge fire-safety risk. However, air curtain burners trap smoke and emissions beneath a fast moving curtain of air. This curtain of air, which gives the technology its name, causes the fire to have a more complete combustion process since it traps and forces the recombustion of smoke and particles, like black carbon, by as much as 98%. Smoke opacity is normally reduced by 95%, harmful emissions are not released into the atmosphere, and the fire is extremely unlikely to spread to surrounding areas. Air curtain burners’ contribution to fire safety and air quality protection make it absolutely indispensable when burning.