The cost of Hurricane Irma

Orange official: Debris in 3-storm year more costly than now

cleanup in Orange County will be less than that of the cleanups associated with the hurricanes of 2004, county officials say.

While the damage from Hurricane Irma was substantial throughout Orange County, the total cost of cleanup should end up being less than the combined hurricane impacts of 2004, officials said Tuesday.

“To put it in perspective, the 2004 hurricanes [Charley, Frances and Jeanne] which dumped double the debris in the county, ran to about $85 million,” said Eric Gassman, deputy county administrator. “We would suspect [this time] it would be something less than that, but we don’t have a good estimate.”

The discussion was part of a countywide debriefing during the County Commission’s Tuesday meeting, with directors ranging from Public Works and Utilities to the Sheriff’s Office and Fire Rescue summing up their departments’ experiences over the course of the days before and after Irma.

Jon Weiss, Orange County development director, said the county has already made assessments of 41,000 structures and found structural damage to 186 and non-structural damage, mostly to roofs, to 320. Twentyone structures are deemed uninhabitable.

Gassman told the commission the Federal Emergency Management Agency will reimburse the county 100 percent for emergency measures and 75 percent for debris pickup. With the state picking up half of what remains, the county is ultimately on the hook for 12.5 percent of debris costs.

What the total will turn out to be, however, will probably not be known for several weeks.

Gassman stressed there would still be upfront costs before reimbursement, which will probably require dipping into county reserves.

The City of Orlando also won’t have cost estimates for some time, spokeswoman Cassandra Lafser said. Orlando did receive more than 1,500 reports of structural and electrical damage to homes and businesses, she said.

Overall, said Ron Plummer, county emergency management manager, about 4,400 people were in the 21 shelters the county activated from Saturday into Monday, with two host shelters for visitors from elsewhere, three pet-friendly shelters and three for more than 350 people with special needs. By Tuesday, the few hundred who remained were moved to a centralized shelter at Barnett Park.

When it came to power, at its peak the Orlando Utilities Commission had about 140,000 outages in the county out of