- Leftover debris from Hurricane Helene could make incoming Hurricane Milton even more dangerous.
- Milton is expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday, the second major storm in two weeks.
- The region has been scrambling to pick up as much debris as possible before it’s too late.
Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of Florida, another major storm is bearing down on the region — and there’s a scramble to clean up before it gets there.
In Tampa, where Hurricane Milton is forecast to make landfall on Wednesday, the city has been working overdrive to clean up the debris left over from Helene before Milton’s winds and flooding turn the city’s wreckage into major safety hazards.
At its peak, Helene caused the highest storm surge on record for Tampa Bay, with water levels reaching nearly 8 feet above normal tide, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data compiled by the Tampa Bay Times. And Milton — which reached category 5 strength on Tuesday afternoon — could bring double that, with a surge up to 15 feet and wind levels of up to 165 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Helene’s surge flooded thousands of homes in the region and created a mass build-up of debris that the city is now scrambling to collect.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference on Tuesday that the state has deployed over 300 dump trucks to collect debris in the hardest-hit areas. And, he added, the state’s Department of Transportation alone has collected more than 1,200 truckloads of debris, totaling 22,000 cubic yards, in just the past 48 hours.
Nick Friedman, the cofounder of College HUNKS Hauling Junk & Moving said after Helene, “it felt like a war zone in the subsequent days where literally everybody’s belongings in their homes was out on the curb because their homes flooded.”
Friedman’s company, which has 200 franchise locations around the US but is headquartered in Tampa, was hired by the city of Tampa to help with the debris removal efforts.
“People who had spent their lifetimes in Tampa said they’ve never experienced something like this,” Friedman told Business Insider.
Just as people were starting to get their bearings and spring into action to clean up the mess, Friedman said, then the second storm was forecast.
“And so people started really scrambling because I would say every other home you passed had a pile of at least a garage’s worth of stuff out on their curb,” Friedman said.
Friedman’s company has been operating 50 of its own junk and moving trucks since being hired by the city, collecting roughly 2 million pounds of debris a day, he estimated.
All that debris gets dumped into landfills that are required to be open 24 hours a day, DeSantis said Tuesday.
Now, it’s even more urgent to get the junk out of the way before Milton strikes, Marla Spence-Howell, the communications coordinator for Tampa’s Solid Waste and Environmental Program Management, told BI.
Any debris — fallen trees, drywall, appliances, broken furniture, cabinets, mattresses, for example — that’s left out on the streets when Milton hits has the potential to cause major hazards.
“With a hundred-plus mile winds, those things will turn into projectiles and get strewn all about,” Friedman said, adding, “It certainly isn’t going to be safe if that stuff hits your house or hits the window. It creates certainly a safety hazard. But it’s definitely going to be a messy, messy, messy cleanup process.”
It’s not just hurricane-force winds that can make the debris more dangerous — flooding too can pick up objects and whip them around, Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, a research scholar and director for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School, told BI.
“Debris removal is one of the biggest expenses in the early stages of recovery because you just have massive amounts of damage and stuff,” Schlegelmilch said. “And then you imagine another storm coming through.”
That creates a compounding effect that makes everything more expensive — and more dangerous, Schlegelmilch said.
In the hardest hit regions of the state, debris removal will continue around the clock “until it’s no longer safe to do so,” DeSantis said Tuesday.
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