"Years. We are talking years."

On a weekday morning not long ago, two state engineers left Baton Rouge, the state capital, to go hunting for places to deposit the remains of half a city. Before the ruined portions of New Orleans can be reconstructed, they must first be deconstructed and hauled away — an estimated 22 million tons of debris, an amount 15 times greater than what was generated by the World Trade Center collapse.

It won't be possible to save many homes, and this writer emphasizes the immense scale of the project of merely hauling away the trash. The title of the article is "Putting away New Orleans."