Long after the natural disasters — whether floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes — and even after people find a place to stay once their homes have been destroyed, somebody still has to take out the trash.

And there’s a tremendous amount of the stuff. In Alabama and Missouri, residents are still digging out from this year’s tragic swarm of tornadoes. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the debris it has picked up in Alabama is enough to cover 172 miles of a 24-foot-wide highway to a depth of six feet, a thoroughfare of detritus that would stretch from New York City to Harrisburg, Pa.

So many trees and other vegetative matter have piled up that enormous grinders (brand name: HogZzilla) are used to chew the waste into smaller chunks so that it takes up less room in landfills.

"Debris is the issue before anything else can be done," said Crystal Payton, a spokeswoman in Joplin, Mo., for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates the federal cleanup effort.

The monster tornado left some 2.5 million cubic yards of debris in Joplin, she said, and "You can’t begin rebuilding, you can’t shift gears into a new phase, until you clean up."

In simpler times, disposing of debris meant piling it up and burning it. Now environmental and health concerns about such pyres mean that much of the mess is sent to landfills, with efforts to separate out the worst of it and recycle when possible.

Debris removal is not "a simple matter of having contractors load and haul truckloads of branches to a landfill," said Lisa Coghlan, a spokeswoman for the Army corps in Alabama. Damaged structures must be demolished, and cars, trucks, boats and refrigerators must be carted away, along with rotting food and hazardous materials. All the while, workers check for substances like asbestos.

The Environmental Protection Agency works to ensure that hazardous substances are kept out of landfills. In Joplin alone, as of July 31, the EPA said that its efforts to divert toxic materials from the stream of debris included more than 1,200 cylinders of propane and compressed gas; 3,624 "white goods," like refrigerators, freezers, air-conditioners, washers and dryers; some 71,000 containers of hazardous materials, from paint cans to 55-gallon drums and larger; 474 batteries; and 24,516 "electronic waste" items, like junked electrical equipment.

With so many organizations taking part in the cleanup, things can get complicated.

"Working together is the key thing," said Mike O’Connell, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.

W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of FEMA, said the agency was doing its best to streamline the operation. The agency worked with the Obama administration to temporarily raise the percentage of cleanup costs paid by the federal government to 90 percent from the usual 75 percent. In Alabama, the 90 percent cost program, called "clean sweep," ended last month. A similar program in Joplin will end Sunday.

"The goal here was to get debris off of residential lots so people could rebuild faster," he said. "We were looking at this as a housing mission."

The business of cleaning up is further complicated by legal issues: Government removal workers generally are not allowed by law onto private land. Instead, home and business owners take their trash to the road, where it can be collected. That doesn’t work so well when everything on the lot has been leveled and the property line is anybody’s guess.

"You couldn’t even identify yards" in many areas, Fugate said. "It was just debris."

But tracking down property owners, many far flung, and working up the legal papers to allow right of entry, is slow work as well.

Some have criticized the federal response. Stanley Yarbrough, a county commissioner in Cullman, Ala., said, "I think their intentions were good," but he complained that government red tape had made the cleanup slower and harder than it needed to be.

Yarbrough also said that the corps could not provide precise cost estimates for federally run debris removal, which made it harder to determine whether the county should simply hire private contractors to do the work.

"If I’m going to bid a contract, I want to know what I’m bidding," he said.

Coghlan of the corps said it had provided a "historic statewide average" for debris removal of $46 per cubic yard. The corps has removed some 4.8 million cubic yards of debris in Alabama. Counties that decided not to use the corps for debris removal still received federal money.

Fugate of FEMA said that the process was sped up over all, but "there were some hiccups in there. It wasn’t perfect."

Messes are a messy business, after all.

© 2011 The New York Times Company