Looking at the piles of rubble and debris from the tsunami leads me to wonder what I would do with it all. Since it's pretty cold there now, I thought about burning it for heat but then I wondered how much is wood/combustible and how dry it would be by now. What do you think? Is harvesting the debris as fuel a viable means to combine clean-up efforts with energy-needs, or are there reasons this would be impractical?

Looking at the piles of rubble and debris from the tsunami leads me to wonder what I would do with it all. Since it's pretty cold there now, I thought about burning it for heat but then I wondered how much is wood/combustible and how dry it would be by now. What do you think? Is harvesting the debris as fuel a viable means to combine clean-up efforts with energy-needs, or are there reasons this would be impractical?

I'm thinking most of it would be pretty wet still. However, if you managed to make shelter from the non-conbustables and find some dry wood, you could dry out wet wood before you burn it.

Getting a fire to start with timber is harder than it seems. It's not like in the movies, where you throw a match on a log, and it goes up in flames. And you couldn't burn most of the debris anyways. The smoke from it would be unbearable.

I'd have to say, your opinion of these people seems rather low. I'm sure they'd figure out really quickly that they can burn wooden debris (if it's too wet they can dry it by keeping a pile of it next to the fire), if they happen to be in need of fuel right now.

I'd have to say, your opinion of these people seems rather low. I'm sure they'd figure out really quickly that they can burn wooden debris (if it's too wet they can dry it by keeping a pile of it next to the fire), if they happen to be in need of fuel right now.

Whose expressing an opinion of "these people?" I was thinking more in terms of the short to medium term endeavor to re-build and clean up. I liked the post about drying out fuel by putting it near the fire before burning it. You could get a good fire going with some gasoline or whatever is available. Ideally some kind of large boilers could be set up in new buildings that are going up so that the debris could be used to heat multi-family residences. It might be hard to set up a whole incinerator-type assembly for every new residential building though. If a power-plant were set up, though, there would be the problem of power lines to distribute the energy as electricity. What a conundrum!