Fed up residents haul storm debris themselves
Jeff Forand chucked a log as long as his arm into a sea of leaves and sticks heaped on the north end of Orange County’s Barnett Park, where residents are dumping Hurricane Irma debris.
“It’s been weeks since the hurricane,” said Forand, 39, of Winter Park, as he pitched a load of leaves, limbs and chained-sawed logs at the county-monitored dump site.
“Since drying out, it looked bad in front of the house,” he said. “I was tired of my house looking like that … so I just did it myself.”
Fed up with the turtle pace of government-funded, storm-debris cleanup, thousands of Central Florida residents are tackling the task. Others are hiring junk crews, landscapers with trailers or ambitious teens with shovels, muscles and a truck to take it away to free drop-off locations.
Most “convenience centers” — the name given to the sites — opened a few days after Hurricane
“The debris sites give citizens who don’t want debris to sit on their property the option, if they choose, to bring it to one of the four sites.” Osceola County spokesman Mark Pino
Irma hit Central Florida on Sept. 11, when it became clear the chore was overwhelming local governments, some of which were abandoned by professional removal contractors.
Orange has 11 locations, Lake has five plus its landfill, while Seminole and Osceola counties created four each.
More than 35,000 people have taken debris to the sites since the first one opened Sept. 13 — some have taken more than one load. They’ve dumped more than 75,000 cubic yards.
That’s enough logs and limbs to fill more than 5,000 dump trucks, which would form a bumper-to-bumper convoy stretching about 23 miles — longer than from Lake Mary to downtown Orlando on Interstate 4.
Osceola County spokesman Mark Pino said the sites are intended as a convenience even as debris-removal contractors work through the county’s neighborhoods with claw trucks and big trailers.
“The debris sites give citizens who don’t want debris to sit on their property the option, if they choose, to bring it to one of the four sites,” he said.
Enterprising Winter Park High School friends Chas Pilgrim, Joey Vicari and Luke Gidus have earned $2,000 shoveling debris into a trailer and hauling it to drop-off sites. Some customers were worried the debris was killing their lawns, the trio said.
The work has other hazards, too.
“Just in this pile, there was a snake and a cat,” said Pilgrim, 18, referring to a trailer load last week.
They’ve also uncovered opossum, raccoons and rodents.
Joe Hernandez, who hauled a load of limbs and leaves as a favor for a friend who was hosting a fundraiser last week, said he was turned away from one Orange dropoff site because he had an automated trailer to carry debris.
A code-enforcement attendant and a pair of Federal Emergency Management Agency monitors assumed he was paid to haul it there. The county-paid monitors check license plates and collect other information the county can use to prove it is following FEMA’s rules for reimbursement of debris-removal costs.
Those expenses topped $53 million during the cleanup for Hurricane Charley in 2004. Charley shook loose an estimated 1.8 million cubic yards in Orange County. Irma’s mess is estimated at 1.3 million.
County rules require commercial contractors to take vegetative storm debris to the landfill on Young Pine Road, east of State Road 417. The landfill charges a tipping fee of $30 a ton. A large curbside heap with logs, limbs, palm fronds and chain-sawed trunks can weigh 1,000 pounds, which would cost $15 to dump at the landfill.
“There’s so much of it on the ground,” Hernandez said. “People just want it gone. I look at it like I’m helping friends and neighbors.”
Many debris piles, heaped at curbs for three weeks or longer, are dry and brittle. Some harbor bugs and other critters. Others block the view of a motorist backing from a driveway or impede pedestrians.
At Barnett Park, a lawnservice owner who rigged his work trailer with plywood boards so he could haul larger loads of storm debris, complained about Orange’s nocontractor policy. He said under the policy, he is considered hired help who can’t dump for free because he charges to pick up. He refused to identify himself for fear he’d have to take his next load to the landfill.
“It looks so bad, man,” he said of debris in Pine Hills, where he lives. “It makes the neighborhood look so bad. Is that what they want?”
In a letter posted Friday on Orange County’s web page, Mayor Teresa Jacobs responded to residents’ frustrations over the slow pace of storm debris pickup. She praised community initiatives during which residents band together, gather their debris and take advantage of the no-fee drop-off sites.
She said “neighbors helping neighbors” is occurring in her own west Orange neighborhood, “which at my personal request is at the very bottom of the debris pickup schedule.”
While the drop-off sites where primarily opened for residents’ convenience, they’re helping local governments, too.
“They help alleviate pressure to our county solid waste facilities,” said Jeff Waters, program manager for Seminole County Solid Waste. “This allows our normal garbage operations to continue to run efficiently.”