Environmentalists drawing up plans to handle the building waste from the Haiti earthquake.
Just a week after Haiti’s catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake, getting aid to victims remains a top priority, but experts are also now starting to assess how to coordinate the sorting and disposing of building rubble.
So far, no large industrial spills have been found. The biggest environmental issue, according to the United Nations Environment Program, is dealing with all of the building waste generated by the earthquake, which destroyed at least 40-50 percent of the buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and devastated other towns in the area.
“Waste management resulting from the earthquake and the devastation of buildings is the biggest environmental concern right now because dealing with this is a precondition for getting everything else done,” said Muralee Thummarukudy of the Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch of the United Nations Environment Program, who arrived in Haiti on Tuesday to coordinate environmental efforts.
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