Mary Kelly-Swafford never knew mold could come in so many colors until she and her husband, Bert, began to gut their mid-city home.

"Black, white, red, yellow, blue, green, purple," she ticks off from inside the structure's skeletal remains, stripped bare of furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes, mementos, and even sheetrock - all of which is piled 10-feet high on the front curb.

"Imagine everything you own sitting in a Port-O-Let for three weeks," adds Mr. Swafford. "That's what it was like in here, nice and soggy and smelly."

That's also what it's like out there - on every curb and around every corner in New Orleans. The rotting piles of debris grow daily as more and more people return to the storm-ravaged city and begin to clean out their homes and businesses.

The task of collecting the trash, estimated at 22 million tons for New Orleans alone, is unprecedented and expected to take months, if not years. The amount is roughly one-tenth of the waste produced annually by US municipalities - but this rancid rubble needs to be picked up and deposited all at once.

That is making for a real challenge for the US Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the project for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The corps has been working at it for more than a month now and says things are going relatively smoothly, all things considered.

Crews are picking up 70,000 cubic yards of debris per day, and more workers are showing up every day to take part in the massive cleanup. The hard part is separating the paint cans from the appliances, the tree limbs from the roof shingles, and the couches from the cleaning supplies - all of which got blended together in the swirling, swampy conditions.

"Not only is there an enormous amount of material in a small geographical area, there is an unprecedented mixture of materials - industrial, commercial, medical - that don't normally get mixed together," says Allen Hershkowitz, director of the solid waste research program at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. "The most immediate problem ... is making sure to remove them from public exposure."

That's the short-term goal. The long-term goal, he says, is to properly dispose of them. But environmentalists worry that speed is taking precedence over proper dumping procedures.

Don Cleary, a quality-assurance supervisor for the corps, is adamant that the disposal is being done correctly. "The most important thing is maintaining a clean waste stream," he says, watching a hazardous-materials crew pick up unmarked containers in the hard-hit Lakeview neighborhood.

He describes how wood debris is separated out and shredded into mulch, construction and demolition materials are hauled off to garbage dumps, household appliances are stripped of Freon and oils, crushed, and sent to steel mills, and hazardous materials are stored separately until proper disposal can be done.

Most of the debris is being hauled to the east side of the city, in the Gentilly area. Formerly a landfill that was capped, the site is again bustling with activity as thousands of trucks roll in and out all day long, dumping baby strollers, mattresses, basketball hoops, attic insulation, Tupperware, tennis shoes, and teddy bears.

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