Baghdad, Iraq ? They’re scenes all too familiar in Iraq: shattered buildings, mangled cars, pools of blood. The carnage takes its toll on the landscape – and those responsible for cleaning up the mess.

There aren’t any trained hazmat specialists here. It’s the same minimum wage guys who sweep trash off the streets for a daily wage of less than $5.

“They’ve gotten used to this,” Amir Ali, spokesman for Baghdad’s municipal government, said of the cleanup crews. “It’s daily routine now to deal with these horrific scenes. All of Baghdad has witnessed destruction.”

With so much violence since the March 2003 invasion, Iraqis have the post-blast drill down pat.

First on the scene are civil defense workers who extinguish fires, provide first aid to survivors and carry off the dead. They then spray the site with jets of water to wash away most of the blood.

Then come the street cleaners, who get no training on how to deal with bombing sites.

“Usually at that point, most of the blood is gone,” said Ammar Adnan, who supervises a cleanup crew. “If not, well, we have to deal with it. We go in, do it quick and leave – you don’t want that depressing scene lurking around for long.”

Adnan, who works part-time to pay for his engineering education at Baghdad University and help his parents with expenses, says there is another reason to work fast: Insurgents sometimes plant a second bomb to kill and maim police and cleaners who rush to the scene.

A civil defense worker washes the road soon after a car bomb Thursday in Baghdad, Iraq. With so much violence, Iraqis can quickly respond to violence and clean it up.

His unit has about 800 workers and is responsible for nearly three-fourths of Baghdad. Even a medium-size explosion requires at least 30 civil defense workers, he said.

Scattered body parts are collected by rescue teams and packed in a bag that is carried by ambulance to a hospital.

Hospital officials say the parts are kept in refrigerators until enough are collected for a burial – but not cremation, in line with Muslim tradition. However, workers at some medical facilities and the Baghdad morgue have complained that bits of flesh sometime clog drain pipes.

Private contractors dispose of blown-apart cars, removing them by crane and taking them to junkyards where metal workers dismantle them. Parts that aren’t too badly damaged are resold, and the rest are melted down.

Mohammed al-Obeidi, who sells scrap metal in Baghdad’s central industrial market, said he sends workers with donkey carts to junkyards to collect twisted car bodies and turns them into iron bars.

“Those mangled cars, we collect them every day,” al-Obeidi said, his matter-of-fact tone illustrating the complacency with which many Iraqis now perceive the daily violence.

It is the low paid, untrained street-sweepers who seem to suffer the most.

Ali, the city government spokesman, confirmed they don’t get training or psychological counseling for coping with the horror, but he said all Iraqis have had to come to grips with carnage.

“The psyche of all Iraqis now is disturbed – whether you work for the health ministry, defense ministry or wherever,” he said. “Even if you don’t have to deal with it because it’s your job, you see it on the street everyday.”