Cement Plant Is Crucial To Japan's Cleanup

OFUNATO, Japan—A massive kiln at a tsunami-damaged cement plant here roared back to life on Wednesday, incinerating tons of wood and plastic debris from buildings destroyed by the killer waves that hit northeastern Japan in March.

The project is one of many under way across the region as communities struggle with the staggering amount of rubble left over from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Japan’s central government estimates that nearly 25 million tons of smashed concrete, steel, wood and other detritus from devastated coastal areas must be cleared away and disposed of to make room for rebuilding.

Completing this gargantuan task—projected to cost more than $8.4 billion and take at least three years—is critical to the recovery process, and it won’t be easy. Authorities are confronting an array of technical hurdles and capacity constraints, all of which are further delaying the reconstruction and frustrating local governments eager to restore some semblance of normalcy.

“The volume is so great, it’s difficult to know what to do with it all,” said Tadashi Umiyama, the head of Ofunato’s construction department and leader of its rubble-removal effort. “There’s just not enough room.”

The quantity of debris in the three prefectures hardest hit by the earthquake and resulting tsunami—Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate—is equivalent to more than a decade’s worth of the region’s normal solid-waste output.

It dwarfs the amount of debris—about 14.5 million tons—that had to be cleaned up after the Hanshin quake, which hit the southern port city of Kobe in 1995.

The presence of significant amounts of salt in the seawater-soaked rubble also makes disposing of it safely more difficult.

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