What seems clear to me is that it´s still too early to draw any conclusions either way, and therefore erring on the side of caution remains the obvious smartest course to take.

Thus I think President Bush is right in urging New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to ease up on his rush to get his city running again. Though I do fervently wish the president would stop doing that urging indirectly through the media. The political gaming surrounding Katrina is beyond stale at this point. It´s high time for a simple phone call to say, "Whoa, Ray, it´s just too soon. I love your city, too; all of America loves your city. But the all-clear hasn´t been given yet. Wait another week or two, at least."

Amid the hurricane fallout, the political pussyfooting and environmental uncertainty, not much is being said about how the immense mass of Katrina-junk will be handled, and where it will all end up. Here is a good article from MSNBC dealing with that topic.

Among many other interesting points, the MSNBC story notes that the total amount of debris will dwarf that of the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. Which lends credence to a headline I saw at the web site of the satirical newspaper The Onion last week: God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again.

OK, I admit it: I´m as weary of this topic as I´m guessing many of you are. So I plan to turn to some non-Katrina news very soon -- like, say, Thursday. I hear they´re still having a lovely garbage-recycling scandal out in San Jose, Calif.; that trash vigilantes are popping out of the woodwork up in Boston; and that college football fans are attaining heretofore unimaginable new levels of slovenliness.

And that´s just off the top of the heap. A muckraker´s work is never done.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.