Waste Pro Assists Municipalities in Recovering from Hurricanes Helene and Milton

Helene and Milton’s gut-punching blows are keeping waste companies hustling in their quest to help bring semblance back to the municipalities and people most impacted.  With franchised contracts throughout Florida and Western North Carolina, Waste Pro is among operations that have been in the throes of it all from the beginning. Two of its division managers share stories from the front line.

Jennifer Herring, Waste Pro’s Atlanta division manager, was dispatched to Ashville just after Helene hit there, after preparing her own team for the weather that by that point had shifted east. What she saw when she got to the rural North Carolina town was surreal, she says.

The flooding was significant; those rivers were moving homes. Roads were washed out; obliterated with fallen trees and power lines; and even the interstate was buried in river sediment.

There was no power, water, or cell service.

Her first charge was to work with management to locate employees who were all sent home before the storm.

“We needed to find out if they were safe and okay; and it was hard with no cell service.  We had better luck getting through by mid Monday [day 4] when some service was restored,” Herring recalls.

Her colleagues in Atlanta trucked in canned and dried food, water, and hygiene essentials; a refrigerated truck delivered hamburgers and hot dogs.

Then conversations turned to restoring service where it was possible and safe, beginning with sending a few commercial fleets to pick up essentials, and staging areas in parking lots where residents on inaccessible streets dropped off trash.

Drivers have worked around power linemen, tree removal companies, and rescue and recovery teams out with cadaver dogs, while navigating narrow, curvy mountain roads in their hulking trucks.

Life is unpredictable as they find themselves having to turn around where roads have disappeared—or when they encounter spray-paint warnings that water has broken free underneath the road, and they have to move over or risk that road collapsing.

Communication is key.

“We have a huddle every morning and talk about the hazards on the streets and how to deal with them. And we review county updates on what’s happening in certain areas,” Herring says.

She has spent days riding with drivers, then heading back to the office and firing up a grill to feed the team, making sure plenty was left for their families when most of them were still without power.

From its location, Waste Pro’s Asheville facility had the luxury of running water and power, so Herring brought in a shower trailer, washers, and dryers.

Household trash volumes have doubled and tripled. Every refrigerator in the town had to be emptied, and seeing as Asheville is a hunting community, plenty more meat stored in deep freezers flowed into the garbage.  

Operations are rebounding to a degree. Recycling routes started back Monday, October 14, where streets are open. One of Waste Pro’s two transfer stations, forced to shutter, is partially running again. The other station couldn’t keep up with the onslaught, so it now goes to the county landfill, which is backed up too, Herring says.

A lot of assets were washed away, and it is yet to be seen how much business remains.

“We are still identifying companies and houses that are no longer there, so we can determine what is still out there for us to collect,” Herring says.

“And we are trying to determine how many of our containers are missing and replacing them. We stopped service where customers tell us they need to take a break as they can’t operate their businesses now. But we have trucks on the street daily and are providing what service we can do safely,” she says.

Florida is a huge market for Waste Pro; the company services 120 franchised contracts in that state.

The first call for Daric Huntt, a Florida division manager, was to get an idea of when that first storm would make landfall.

“When you get to the 48- or 36-hour mark you start to determine how you will prepare the facility and when to pull your employees off the road,” he says.

His team, which covers Pinellas and Hillsborough Counties, kept going till the day before the first storm, Helene, hit. At that last stretch, the night maintenance shift came in early to make sure all trucks’ safety features were in check so they would be ready to roll post storm.

The next job was to hunker down the hauling facility and fleet. The crew leveraged the trucks for protection, buddying them up, nose to nose, as tightly as they could to safeguard windshields and all the cab components.   

Not only did the trucks protect each other, but they secured the facility too. Staff butted them against the bay doors inside the maintenance shop, raising the forks on the arms to brace those doors.  

“Our most important safety decision was to delay start times so that drivers who typically begin around 4 a.m. have sunlight for better visualization of low-hanging power lines, flooded streets, and other hazards they might not see in the dark,” Huntt says.

There was little time to adapt to these and other new realities; the next big one—Milton—was on the way. The crew quickly cleared crumbled rocks and other potential projectiles, spewn on the streets. And Huntt got in touch with corporate for more backing from other Waste Pro locations who sent support staff, trucks, and equipment to deal with the pending escalating load.

While they work to keep themselves going, the Florida team supports municipalities and their residents struggling to get by, sometimes taking on new roles.

“We stay in touch and help any way we can. For instance, municipalities have contracts with storm collection companies that work directly with FEMA, but those providers are stretched thin. So, we’ve been there to supply claw trucks, using them on the beach to support their cleanup work,” Huntt says.

With regulatory approvals, Waste Pro turned its concrete facility into a disposal site for Class 3 materials like C&D debris, furniture, refrigerators, and other household appliances. This new outlet opened up opportunity to move faster on the streets, which especially made a huge difference ahead of the second storm.

Companies had a dire need for more receptacles for storm debris deluging the streets, a service FEMA does not provide. So, Waste Pro brought in roll offs, then hauled them once they were filled. That business line has tripled in the past couple of weeks – climbing from about 50 movements to 150 movements a day.

Today they are overcapacity, collecting tremendous volumes above what’s normal. And drivers who were working 48 to 50 hours weekly now put in upwards of 60 hours.

They still deal with the aftermath.

Says Huntt: “You see light at the end of the tunnel, but that light is far down the tunnel. There is a lot of recovery and cleanup work to do to get us back to where we were.

“It’s gonna take some time.”