Final resting place for City Hall debris is Clint

Less than 24 hours after Sunday’s implosion of El Paso’s former City Hall, the official cleanup began early Monday morning.

Lots of curious people flocked to the City Hall site to take pictures of the massive debris pile left behind after the picture-perfect implosion.

“I’m wondering where it’s all going?” said El Paso resident Margarita Yanez, who stopped by the site to take pictures of the pile.

It’s all going to the El Paso Landfill in Clint, one truckload at a time.

Laura Salome, an employee at Sperry Van Ness Realty company right next door to the old City Hall, saw lots of those trucks pass by her building on Monday.

“We’re excited about the baseball stadium,” she said when asked if there were any concerns about the cleanup. “We’re in full support of it and love what’s happening in Downtown El Paso. It’s an exciting time to be here and we can live with the dust. Unfortunately, it’s during the windy months but we’re good.”

Ballpark Project Engineer Alan Shubert said crews are doing their best to mitigate the dust.

“There’s a lot of fire hoses around,” Shubert said. “They’re trying, doing their best to keep the pile wet. It’s very difficult in El Paso to keep the dust down on a dusty day but they’re doing the best they can to keep it wet as they work off the pile.”

That pile is about 13,000 cubic yards of rubble. A cubic yard is about what it takes to fill a regular pickup truck. But Shubert said it’ll take about 1,000 loads of semi-trucks to get it all hauled away.

“It’s less than a week’s volume for our city’s household waste,” Shubert said.

ABC-7 followed one of the trucks all the way to the El Paso Landfill in Clint on Monday. The trip from the former City Hall site, down Franklin Street and out to Clint took about 30 minutes one way.

“The volume of trucks that goes out there is so far greater than this,” Shubert said. “We’re just another customer.”

For perspective, the landfill takes in about 430,000 tons of trash a year. The debris pile at City Hall, according to Shubert, amounts to only about three-percent of that annual total.

Shubert says the hope is that all of the debris is hauled away over the next two weeks so construction on the Ballpark can begin.