Jim Pogue, a US Army Corps of Engineers spokesman, said on Wednesday that debris from Hurricane Katrina across southeastern Louisiana amounted to 55 million cubic yards, enough to fill 3.5 million large dump trucks.

"The trucks would stretch 36,500 miles. They would reach all the way around the earth at the equator and you would still have enough trucks left over to stretch from New York to Denver," he said.

After Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29 Hurricane Rita hit an area to the west last weekend, smashing more homes into piles of planking, trashed furniture and personal effects. The amount of debris there is still being estimated.

Residents who can return home are finding little or nothing worth saving -- and simply dumping their ruined belongings outside in their yards.

Kenny Deluane, 51, clad in boots and a respiratory mask, dragged barely recognizable furniture out of his water-sodden house in St. Bernard Parish just to the east of New Orleans and looked at it with an expression of disgust.

"I can't haul it and I'm not paying somebody to haul it," he said. "It ain't my fault my house flooded."

A few blocks away, a tearful Lisa Ramos, 36, carried in her arms all that she could save -- an umbrella, a seashell-covered box of old coins, two commemorative plates and a wet wad of canceled checks wrapped in a rubber band -- and drove away from her ruined house.

"You can't salvage anything else," she said, adding, "I really hate to see this. It felt like home."

In New Orleans, some 160,000 houses are believed damaged beyond repair, and estimates of tens of thousands to more than 300,000 cars lie abandoned.

SEPTIC STEW

Much of the wreckage was drenched in what environmental officials call septic stew or bacterial soup - a putrid mix of floodwater and raw sewage from more than two dozen major waste water treatment facilities knocked out of commission or flooded by Katrina.

Clean-up from the hurricane, that breached levees to flood New Orleans, will take a year to complete, the Corps said, at a cost of $1.5 billion.

Estimates of debris from Rita are still being calculated by officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a spokesman said. That figure likely will be lower as it did not cause as much damage nor strike a major city the way Katrina hit New Orleans.

The Corps is working with many different communities, some with debris removal plans in place and others still struggling to emerge from the chaos of the storm.

"We're moving just as fast as we can," the Corps spokesman said. "We want to see the debris out of there, almost as much as the residents do."

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as razing ruined blocks. Houses must be officially condemned, then taken apart bit by bit. Workers need to remove the three to ten pounds of hazardous substances typically found under a household sink, like drain cleaner, pesticides and bleach.

Automobiles need to be drained, Freon removed from air conditioning units, tires taken off and switches containing mercury taken away before they are hauled off for scrap.

"If it was just a bulldozing process, that's one thing but it isn't. You've got to go house by house, car by car, property owner by property owner," said Darin Mann, spokesman for the state's Department of Environmental Quality.

This week officials began collecting so-called white goods, like refrigerators, stoves and other household appliances to take to landfill.

Most cars also will go to landfill, while their tires will be chopped up and recycled. Some cars will be broken down and sold for parts, said Dennis Baker, a private tow truck operator hauling cars out of the city under contract with an automotive parts dealer.