Amid the clanging of dump trucks, a crane with a clamshell scoop hoisted a pile of debris as big as a minivan and dropped it onto a waiting barge — striking evidence that New York City has revived a place it just cannot seem to do without.

The Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island, where tons of debris was sifted through after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has once again been enlisted after a disaster, this time to serve as the staging area for the monumental cleanup job under way since Hurricane Sandy hit.

Again and again, that scoop plunges into a three-story hill of debris and lifts out the refuse of the storm: pulverized drywall, floorboards, furniture, clothing, photo albums.

The cleanup has turned into a 24-hour-a-day, military-scale operation at Fresh Kills, with the New York City Sanitation Department and the Army Corps of Engineers running a fleet of several hundred trucks, river barges and tugboats that will be moving an estimated four million cubic yards of debris to landfills in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. And that is just New York City.