Leftovers from two houses demolished last year
This is all stuff I found in two vacant lots where two homes once stood:
3 fire extinguishers
18L plastic kerosene tank
18L plastic gasoline tank top section
Aluminum window tracks
Steel water pipes
Broken window panes
Rusty metal motor oil bucket
Fluorescent light bulb
Plastic utensils
Plastic food wrappers
Fishing net floats
Plastic hose
Bedding
Many 35kg plastic fertilizer bags
Etc...
Actually, the baskets were salvaged from a current demolition site. The houses on these two now-empty lots were torn down last summer. All of the lots with demolished homes look very similar with heaps of trash still let behind, basically smashed into the mud by the machines that are too big to pick up the smaller pieces of trash. No human effort is made to tidy up after the machines move on to the next site.
I am reminded of an observation made by Abraham Maslow in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." In our case on the island, we have huge steam shovels and scissor-clawed cranes to destroy old houses then pick up and remove the debris. If it is not big enough to smash and grab then it literally falls through the cracks of the machine's claw or bucket and is left to litter the ground.
Without the machines we would not be able to efficiently remove the old unsafe houses or the original tsunami debris. But, with the machines all of the useful materials are destroyed and smashed to bits. Where is the happy medium?
This reminds me of another great (paraphrased) quote by Albert Einstein, that will close out today's thoughts: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”
3 fire extinguishers
18L plastic kerosene tank
18L plastic gasoline tank top section
Aluminum window tracks
Steel water pipes
Broken window panes
Rusty metal motor oil bucket
Fluorescent light bulb
Plastic utensils
Plastic food wrappers
Fishing net floats
Plastic hose
Bedding
Many 35kg plastic fertilizer bags
Etc...
Actually, the baskets were salvaged from a current demolition site. The houses on these two now-empty lots were torn down last summer. All of the lots with demolished homes look very similar with heaps of trash still let behind, basically smashed into the mud by the machines that are too big to pick up the smaller pieces of trash. No human effort is made to tidy up after the machines move on to the next site.
I am reminded of an observation made by Abraham Maslow in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." In our case on the island, we have huge steam shovels and scissor-clawed cranes to destroy old houses then pick up and remove the debris. If it is not big enough to smash and grab then it literally falls through the cracks of the machine's claw or bucket and is left to litter the ground.
Without the machines we would not be able to efficiently remove the old unsafe houses or the original tsunami debris. But, with the machines all of the useful materials are destroyed and smashed to bits. Where is the happy medium?
This reminds me of another great (paraphrased) quote by Albert Einstein, that will close out today's thoughts: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”
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