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There were the mounds of it piled along avenues, raked into backyards and poured into basements, giving the landscape along the New York and New Jersey coasts a strangely Saharan quality in the storm's wake.

And now, it needs to be cleaned before it can be replaced on area beaches. That is a job so big that, in one stretch of the Rockaways alone, the process has been going on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a month — truckload after truckload of it being poured through super-size versions of children's toy sifters.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the operation on behalf of the city's parks department, says that in the six weeks leading up to New Year's Day, the crews in Queens had filtered 94,000 cubic yards of sand. That is enough, the agency estimated, to fill a football field to a depth four feet higher than the goal posts — or 44 feet — said Robert Schneider, an engineer technician for the corps.

In the late afternoon light at Jacob Riis Park this week, front-end loaders took turns depositing lumpy, darkened sand into the top of the equipment. Giant vibrating screens shook the sand, extracting all manner of flotsam, which was then dumped unceremoniously from one conveyor belt, while clean, or relatively clean, sand fell to the ground from another belt.

Surveying the most recent piles of rubbish bound for landfills, Philip Sparacio, the parks department's deputy chief of operations in Queens, said: "You've got everything from boardwalk slats, trash cans, the trash that was in the trash cans, mailboxes, telephone poles, household debris. It's a nice assortment."

Indeed, as one of two machines sifted a fresh infusion of soiled sand, an unseemly mixture plopped from the conveyor belt onto the parking lot: cinder blocks, a woman's shoe, chunks of plywood, a six-foot piece of metal pipe, a plastic barrel, a store sign, a swatch of fabric and videotape from a VHS camera. "I can't help but think that a lot of people's lives are out on the curb here," said George Kroenert, a parks official who is helping with the city's recovery effort.

The items plucked from the sand have been part of the 10,800 truckloads of debris that have rumbled out of the city to landfills in upstate New York and in Pennsylvania. Strung end to end, the tractor-trailers would extend from New York City to Albany.

Across the lot at Jacob Riis Park, which is part of Gateway National Recreation Area, stood nearly a dozen perfect cones of gleaming sand, rising 20 feet. A herring gull perched at the top of one cone looked toward the ocean across Rockaway Beach Boulevard, which was calm on an unseasonably warm January day.

The filtered sand looked downright silky compared with its earlier condition. But the machines, though impressive, are not perfect. A small piece of PVC tubing, three-eighths of an inch, for example, had managed to slip past the mesh screen, landing in the clean pile. "It gets 99 percent of the debris and 100 percent of anything over three inches," Mr. Schneider explained.

But were it not for the mechanized sand filters, which look like something out of Star Wars, the beaches might never achieve their pre-hurricane glow. "It would take a lot of people walking on the beach and picking up debris and putting it in a barrel," Mr. Schneider said.

The filtered sand is being trucked to the beaches up and down the Rockaways, where two-thirds of the five-mile boardwalk was torn from its concrete stanchions during the storm. Until the boardwalk can be fully replaced, which could take a few years, parks workers are pouring piles of clean sand in between the stanchions, in part to create a bulwark against future storms.

Whether there is enough to fill all the bays, or gaps, between the stanchions, remains to be seen. Each bay measures about 20 feet wide. The sand cleaning is now winding down, with the Army Corps expecting to finish the Rockaways job by Monday. "We're keeping our fingers crossed," Mr. Kroenert said. "It's an imperfect science, but when you eyeball it, it looks like we will have enough."

Over on Beach 97th Street, Tanyia Christian, a local resident, walked past the piles of freshly deposited sand on Shorefront Parkway and onto the beach, which was sprinkled with clam shells. She admired the progress of the sand replenishment, but worried about the missing boardwalk. "We're not going to recover by summer," she said glumly.

Parks officials caution that coming back from Hurricane Sandy is a marathon, not a sprint, and they vow that summer will arrive, as always, in the Rockaways. "People will be able to use the beach," said Veronica White, the parks commissioner, on a recent visit to the battered boardwalk. "It won't be what it was or what it will be. But it will be pretty and safe."