jmc
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This is a good article about guys with pickups and trailers heading to Florida to clean up. Since WSJ Online requires a subscription, I pasted it into this post rather than provide a link. Hope nobody minds.
i <font color="blue"> [Cleaning Up
For Some Workers,
Storms in Florida
Rain Opportunity
A $1 Billion Job Attracts Men
With Trucks and Tricks;
Feds Try to Prevent Fraud
A Hauler Protests His Score
By CHAD TERHUNE and CARRICK MOLLENKAMP
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 15, 2004; Page A1
ORLANDO, Fla. -- After Hurricane Charley sliced through Florida last month, Tommy Wise quit his job as a concrete-mix driver in Tifton, Ga., and headed south in his Chevrolet pickup truck.
Mr. Wise, 31 years old, joined thousands eager to cash in on Florida's storm-ravaged landscape. This past weekend, he and two carnival-ride workers from North Carolina whom he hired off the street in downtown Orlando loaded tree limbs and brush by hand into a metal trailer for 12 hours each day. Mr. Wise drove his load to a temporary dump site, where 30-foot heaps of debris cover an area the size of several football fields.
"You know you're going to make good money down here," said Mr. Wise, smiling through a three-day stubble. "I'm going to come back with enough money for a new truck and to buy a house."
After hurricanes Charley and Frances, Florida has become one of the federal government's most expensive cleanup jobs ever. It could cost $1 billion or more to haul away all the detritus snapped and scattered by the storms.
The work is a bonanza for a motley bunch of laborers like Mr. Wise who work as subcontractors to bigger outfits with municipal cleanup contracts. Many homeowners in Florida are pressuring local officials to clean up the mess faster. Dump sites, trucks and drivers are all in short supply. Another big obstacle: the need to combat fraud that has historically plagued disaster cleanups.
Now Hurricane Ivan is expected to lash the Florida Panhandle and other parts of the Gulf coast late today or Thursday morning with ferocious winds and rain, likely adding to the cleanup bill. Ivan could also cause the cleanup in the rest of Florida to drag on longer as freelance haulers abandon their current routes for the fresh devastation of the new storm.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees disaster cleanups, typically pays 75% or more of local debris-removal costs, leaving state and local governments to shoulder the rest. Past FEMA cleanup bills range from $3.5 million after a 2001 ice storm in Haskell County, Okla., to roughly $800 million to clean up the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
Most Florida municipalities had bid out prearranged contracts prior to the hurricanes with one of the half-dozen companies that specialize in debris removal. They include Crowder-Gulf Inc., a joint venture with offices in Alabama and Florida, and AshBritt Inc., Pompano Beach, Fla. Several of the companies pack powerful connections. Crowder-Gulf operations manager Raymond "Buddy" Young is a former FEMA regional director. DRC Inc., which has debris contracts in Florida, counts former FEMA Director James Lee Witt and another former FEMA official, Mark Merritt, as special advisers.
Local governments typically activate the standing contract after a storm hits, and the contractor swings into action within days. These companies, some of whom helped clean up Ground Zero after 9/11 and pulverized dead pigs after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, usually don't have enough employees and equipment for these enormous jobs. That creates opportunity for people like Mr. Wise. Some journeymen work repeatedly with the same contractor, following from storm to storm.
The better-established ones, called "self loaders," drive large tractor-trailers with mechanical claws that can pluck piles of debris off the roadside. Many others are "hand loaders" such as Mr. Wise, who simply show up in a pickup truck and a trailer after disaster strikes and start working for whichever company offers the most per load. Independent haulers know how desperately they are in demand, and many openly admit they play contractors against each other, working for one in the morning and defecting to another in the afternoon for higher pay.
The Econo Lodge parking lot near the Orlando airport was packed during the past week with big rigs and small trailers with makeshift walls of plywood or aluminum siding tacked on to increase the size of each load.
Haulers start work by getting their trucks photographed and measured. Monitors slap a placard on the side with a tracking number and bed capacity in cubic yards, and the truck is assigned a specific area of a town. Haulers like Mr. Wise generally can earn about $5 per cubic yard or roughly $200 for a full load. Haulers aim to drop off four or five loads in a 12-hour day. The general contractors who employ them pull down $10 to $20 per cubic yard depending on the terms of their deals with municipalities, plus an additional $4 to $6 per cubic yard for grinding the material into mulch or burning it at the dump site.
As residential developments spread, it isn't easy to find convenient temporary dump sites. One acre is needed for every 9,000 cubic yards of material, says Teresa Carter, a Raleigh, N.C., disaster-response adviser. Charley and Frances produced an estimated 50 million cubic yards of debris, compared with 12 million for Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Officials in Orlando and surrounding Orange County say they have so far picked up 1.6 million cubic yards of the estimated four million cubic yards of debris littering the area hit by Charley and Frances.
The standard industry rule is that it takes two days of grinding for every day of debris brought in. That means people near the dumps are going to be living with the piles for weeks or months, and some tower three or more stories into the air. The Southview Baptist Church, which is about 50 yards from an Orange County dump site, canceled a recent outdoor potluck supper because of the stench from the dead leaves and rotting mulch. "It's getting pretty ripe," said Jim Barrett, the church pastor. Dave Kaufman, a 64-year-old salesman who lives across from the same dump, adds: "It's not right it took this long for them to clean it up."
The storms have provided a crash course in debris removal for Florida counties. Polk County, sitting near the middle of the state, hadn't seen a major hurricane since Donna in 1960. After Charley and Frances, it needed to remove 1.1 million cubic yards of debris. County officials piggybacked onto two debris-removal contracts other municipalities had with Crowder-Gulf and Grubbs Emergency Services LLC, Brooksville, Fla.
But when FEMA's lawyers took a look, they told Polk County its contract with Grubbs was a problem because it paid Grubbs a hefty $25 per cubic yard while Crowder-Gulf was getting $16.50 for the same services. Polk dismissed Grubbs. Local governments are careful to follow FEMA's rules to ensure they get maximum reimbursement from the federal agency. Polk also had to hire General Physics Corp., Elkridge, Md., to establish a monitoring system of the haulers because county staff were stretched too thin. "As I found out, it's not a simple process," said Jim Freeman, Polk's deputy county manager.
Fraud has often riddled natural-disaster cleanups. The work is particularly susceptible to abuse when the cleanup is widespread and comes in an election year when officials don't want to slow down the process with what might look like red tape.
Michael Brown, director of FEMA, said he must balance communities' needs for a quick cleanup against protecting taxpayer dollars from being wasted on unnecessary or fraudulent debris removal. "I knew this would be an area ripe for abuse," Mr. Brown said in an interview this week. "Debris removal is a huge financial opportunity for people."
Shortly after Hurricane Charley hit in mid-August, Mr. Brown said he asked that officials from the inspector general's office in the federal Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, fan out in Florida to check for fraud. "The sad part is 90% of the workers are great and they are there to do a great job and make sure the community is cleaned up. There are another 5% or 10% down there to take advantage of the system," Mr. Brown said.
After Hurricane Fran swept through eastern North Carolina in 1996, a cleanup company pleaded guilty to claiming more hours than it actually worked while cleaning the shores of a state lake and other areas. In 1998, after Hurricane Georges hit Puerto Rico, a mayor asked a debris-removal contractor for a bribe of $2.5 million, a large pickup truck, a motorcycle and other items. The mayor and contractor were found guilty of defrauding FEMA of disaster funds.
There are several tricks in the trade. Some haulers have welded chain-link fences across the bottom half of a truck bed so it fills up faster. Haulers in Florida this month have tried to leave the collection sites without dumping their load in a bid to circle back and get paid for it twice. Now monitors are posted on elevated trucks at the exits.
Another common ploy is cutting down live trees rather than looking for debris on the ground. "People are out there just making money by cutting down trees and creating debris. They see this as a get-rich-quick scheme," said Ben Turner, president of Phillips & Jordan Inc., Knoxville, Tenn., which has major debris-removal contracts in Florida.
FEMA requires officials to follow a detailed disaster-recovery playbook and sets standards for policing private haulers. Charmaine Glean, a home-health nurse from Trinidad, was looking for a second job and heard from a friend that an engineering firm was hiring debris monitors. R.W. Beck Inc., a Seattle-based firm, has Orlando's monitoring contract and hired Ms. Glean at $15 an hour.
After a half-day of training in FEMA guidelines, she stood last weekend in a neighborhood underneath the searing sun as haulers drove up. She asked them what street they picked their debris from and wrote them the crucial "load ticket," which haulers must have to get paid. The ticket confirms that the hauler picked up genuine debris in his assigned area. Some of the haulers try to take advantage of her inexperience, she says, asking for a blank load ticket -- the equivalent of a blank check.
Ms. Glean has had to press haulers to clean one street fully before going on to bigger piles elsewhere that are easier to load. That has sparked some shouting matches. She drives down the streets being cleaned every few hours to confirm what the haulers are telling her. "These are rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi. They don't want to pick up the little piles, but if they don't do what I say, I don't give them a load ticket," Ms. Glean said.
Once they get a load ticket, haulers head to one of the big municipal dump sites. Leaning out from a 20-foot-high wooden tower, another inspector, Patricia Hennessey, peers down at a Ford F150 pickup truck pulling a trailer with branches and brush stacked inside.
Ms. Hennessey, a land surveyor in Houston called in by her employer, Miami-based engineering firm PBS&J Inc., scans the trailer for 15 seconds, then flips the pages on a pad of paper until she gets to the number 60 for a load she deems 60% full. Like an Olympic gymnastics judge, she flashes the score to a worker on the ground who writes it on the hauler's load ticket. "You can see through that," she says, pointing to spaces between limbs piled into the truck. That's a common problem even for honest hand loaders, who can't compress debris like the bigger trucks.
The hauler, Spencer Murphy of Centreville, Ala., gets out of his truck to protest. "That ain't no 60. That's full," the 26-year-old shouts. His score doesn't change and he pulls around to add his debris to a pile already 30 feet high. Mr. Murphy and other haulers express frustration at the low scores they receive. They think the monitors don't appreciate the level of manual labor involved in picking debris by hand in Florida's hot, muggy weather.
"We're just trying to get a fair shake. The motel and gas stations aren't charging me 60%," said Mr. Murphy, who says he's earning about $3 per cubic yard collected.
Many parts of Florida are still a mess, but as time goes on the work gets less attractive for haulers because the easy pickings are gone and it takes longer to fill a truck. Officials in Orlando said one contractor last week had already fallen to just 48 haulers, down from a high of 125 immediately after Charley.
Mr. Wise dropped off a half-full load at the Orlando dump last weekend so he could move on. "My boss man said there is a lot more work in Tampa," said Mr. Wise, a sweat-soaked blue bandanna pulled back on his forehead. "He told me to finish up and c'mon."]
i <font color="blue"> [Cleaning Up
For Some Workers,
Storms in Florida
Rain Opportunity
A $1 Billion Job Attracts Men
With Trucks and Tricks;
Feds Try to Prevent Fraud
A Hauler Protests His Score
By CHAD TERHUNE and CARRICK MOLLENKAMP
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 15, 2004; Page A1
ORLANDO, Fla. -- After Hurricane Charley sliced through Florida last month, Tommy Wise quit his job as a concrete-mix driver in Tifton, Ga., and headed south in his Chevrolet pickup truck.
Mr. Wise, 31 years old, joined thousands eager to cash in on Florida's storm-ravaged landscape. This past weekend, he and two carnival-ride workers from North Carolina whom he hired off the street in downtown Orlando loaded tree limbs and brush by hand into a metal trailer for 12 hours each day. Mr. Wise drove his load to a temporary dump site, where 30-foot heaps of debris cover an area the size of several football fields.
"You know you're going to make good money down here," said Mr. Wise, smiling through a three-day stubble. "I'm going to come back with enough money for a new truck and to buy a house."
After hurricanes Charley and Frances, Florida has become one of the federal government's most expensive cleanup jobs ever. It could cost $1 billion or more to haul away all the detritus snapped and scattered by the storms.
The work is a bonanza for a motley bunch of laborers like Mr. Wise who work as subcontractors to bigger outfits with municipal cleanup contracts. Many homeowners in Florida are pressuring local officials to clean up the mess faster. Dump sites, trucks and drivers are all in short supply. Another big obstacle: the need to combat fraud that has historically plagued disaster cleanups.
Now Hurricane Ivan is expected to lash the Florida Panhandle and other parts of the Gulf coast late today or Thursday morning with ferocious winds and rain, likely adding to the cleanup bill. Ivan could also cause the cleanup in the rest of Florida to drag on longer as freelance haulers abandon their current routes for the fresh devastation of the new storm.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees disaster cleanups, typically pays 75% or more of local debris-removal costs, leaving state and local governments to shoulder the rest. Past FEMA cleanup bills range from $3.5 million after a 2001 ice storm in Haskell County, Okla., to roughly $800 million to clean up the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
Most Florida municipalities had bid out prearranged contracts prior to the hurricanes with one of the half-dozen companies that specialize in debris removal. They include Crowder-Gulf Inc., a joint venture with offices in Alabama and Florida, and AshBritt Inc., Pompano Beach, Fla. Several of the companies pack powerful connections. Crowder-Gulf operations manager Raymond "Buddy" Young is a former FEMA regional director. DRC Inc., which has debris contracts in Florida, counts former FEMA Director James Lee Witt and another former FEMA official, Mark Merritt, as special advisers.
Local governments typically activate the standing contract after a storm hits, and the contractor swings into action within days. These companies, some of whom helped clean up Ground Zero after 9/11 and pulverized dead pigs after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, usually don't have enough employees and equipment for these enormous jobs. That creates opportunity for people like Mr. Wise. Some journeymen work repeatedly with the same contractor, following from storm to storm.
The better-established ones, called "self loaders," drive large tractor-trailers with mechanical claws that can pluck piles of debris off the roadside. Many others are "hand loaders" such as Mr. Wise, who simply show up in a pickup truck and a trailer after disaster strikes and start working for whichever company offers the most per load. Independent haulers know how desperately they are in demand, and many openly admit they play contractors against each other, working for one in the morning and defecting to another in the afternoon for higher pay.
The Econo Lodge parking lot near the Orlando airport was packed during the past week with big rigs and small trailers with makeshift walls of plywood or aluminum siding tacked on to increase the size of each load.
Haulers start work by getting their trucks photographed and measured. Monitors slap a placard on the side with a tracking number and bed capacity in cubic yards, and the truck is assigned a specific area of a town. Haulers like Mr. Wise generally can earn about $5 per cubic yard or roughly $200 for a full load. Haulers aim to drop off four or five loads in a 12-hour day. The general contractors who employ them pull down $10 to $20 per cubic yard depending on the terms of their deals with municipalities, plus an additional $4 to $6 per cubic yard for grinding the material into mulch or burning it at the dump site.
As residential developments spread, it isn't easy to find convenient temporary dump sites. One acre is needed for every 9,000 cubic yards of material, says Teresa Carter, a Raleigh, N.C., disaster-response adviser. Charley and Frances produced an estimated 50 million cubic yards of debris, compared with 12 million for Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Officials in Orlando and surrounding Orange County say they have so far picked up 1.6 million cubic yards of the estimated four million cubic yards of debris littering the area hit by Charley and Frances.
The standard industry rule is that it takes two days of grinding for every day of debris brought in. That means people near the dumps are going to be living with the piles for weeks or months, and some tower three or more stories into the air. The Southview Baptist Church, which is about 50 yards from an Orange County dump site, canceled a recent outdoor potluck supper because of the stench from the dead leaves and rotting mulch. "It's getting pretty ripe," said Jim Barrett, the church pastor. Dave Kaufman, a 64-year-old salesman who lives across from the same dump, adds: "It's not right it took this long for them to clean it up."
The storms have provided a crash course in debris removal for Florida counties. Polk County, sitting near the middle of the state, hadn't seen a major hurricane since Donna in 1960. After Charley and Frances, it needed to remove 1.1 million cubic yards of debris. County officials piggybacked onto two debris-removal contracts other municipalities had with Crowder-Gulf and Grubbs Emergency Services LLC, Brooksville, Fla.
But when FEMA's lawyers took a look, they told Polk County its contract with Grubbs was a problem because it paid Grubbs a hefty $25 per cubic yard while Crowder-Gulf was getting $16.50 for the same services. Polk dismissed Grubbs. Local governments are careful to follow FEMA's rules to ensure they get maximum reimbursement from the federal agency. Polk also had to hire General Physics Corp., Elkridge, Md., to establish a monitoring system of the haulers because county staff were stretched too thin. "As I found out, it's not a simple process," said Jim Freeman, Polk's deputy county manager.
Fraud has often riddled natural-disaster cleanups. The work is particularly susceptible to abuse when the cleanup is widespread and comes in an election year when officials don't want to slow down the process with what might look like red tape.
Michael Brown, director of FEMA, said he must balance communities' needs for a quick cleanup against protecting taxpayer dollars from being wasted on unnecessary or fraudulent debris removal. "I knew this would be an area ripe for abuse," Mr. Brown said in an interview this week. "Debris removal is a huge financial opportunity for people."
Shortly after Hurricane Charley hit in mid-August, Mr. Brown said he asked that officials from the inspector general's office in the federal Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, fan out in Florida to check for fraud. "The sad part is 90% of the workers are great and they are there to do a great job and make sure the community is cleaned up. There are another 5% or 10% down there to take advantage of the system," Mr. Brown said.
After Hurricane Fran swept through eastern North Carolina in 1996, a cleanup company pleaded guilty to claiming more hours than it actually worked while cleaning the shores of a state lake and other areas. In 1998, after Hurricane Georges hit Puerto Rico, a mayor asked a debris-removal contractor for a bribe of $2.5 million, a large pickup truck, a motorcycle and other items. The mayor and contractor were found guilty of defrauding FEMA of disaster funds.
There are several tricks in the trade. Some haulers have welded chain-link fences across the bottom half of a truck bed so it fills up faster. Haulers in Florida this month have tried to leave the collection sites without dumping their load in a bid to circle back and get paid for it twice. Now monitors are posted on elevated trucks at the exits.
Another common ploy is cutting down live trees rather than looking for debris on the ground. "People are out there just making money by cutting down trees and creating debris. They see this as a get-rich-quick scheme," said Ben Turner, president of Phillips & Jordan Inc., Knoxville, Tenn., which has major debris-removal contracts in Florida.
FEMA requires officials to follow a detailed disaster-recovery playbook and sets standards for policing private haulers. Charmaine Glean, a home-health nurse from Trinidad, was looking for a second job and heard from a friend that an engineering firm was hiring debris monitors. R.W. Beck Inc., a Seattle-based firm, has Orlando's monitoring contract and hired Ms. Glean at $15 an hour.
After a half-day of training in FEMA guidelines, she stood last weekend in a neighborhood underneath the searing sun as haulers drove up. She asked them what street they picked their debris from and wrote them the crucial "load ticket," which haulers must have to get paid. The ticket confirms that the hauler picked up genuine debris in his assigned area. Some of the haulers try to take advantage of her inexperience, she says, asking for a blank load ticket -- the equivalent of a blank check.
Ms. Glean has had to press haulers to clean one street fully before going on to bigger piles elsewhere that are easier to load. That has sparked some shouting matches. She drives down the streets being cleaned every few hours to confirm what the haulers are telling her. "These are rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi. They don't want to pick up the little piles, but if they don't do what I say, I don't give them a load ticket," Ms. Glean said.
Once they get a load ticket, haulers head to one of the big municipal dump sites. Leaning out from a 20-foot-high wooden tower, another inspector, Patricia Hennessey, peers down at a Ford F150 pickup truck pulling a trailer with branches and brush stacked inside.
Ms. Hennessey, a land surveyor in Houston called in by her employer, Miami-based engineering firm PBS&J Inc., scans the trailer for 15 seconds, then flips the pages on a pad of paper until she gets to the number 60 for a load she deems 60% full. Like an Olympic gymnastics judge, she flashes the score to a worker on the ground who writes it on the hauler's load ticket. "You can see through that," she says, pointing to spaces between limbs piled into the truck. That's a common problem even for honest hand loaders, who can't compress debris like the bigger trucks.
The hauler, Spencer Murphy of Centreville, Ala., gets out of his truck to protest. "That ain't no 60. That's full," the 26-year-old shouts. His score doesn't change and he pulls around to add his debris to a pile already 30 feet high. Mr. Murphy and other haulers express frustration at the low scores they receive. They think the monitors don't appreciate the level of manual labor involved in picking debris by hand in Florida's hot, muggy weather.
"We're just trying to get a fair shake. The motel and gas stations aren't charging me 60%," said Mr. Murphy, who says he's earning about $3 per cubic yard collected.
Many parts of Florida are still a mess, but as time goes on the work gets less attractive for haulers because the easy pickings are gone and it takes longer to fill a truck. Officials in Orlando said one contractor last week had already fallen to just 48 haulers, down from a high of 125 immediately after Charley.
Mr. Wise dropped off a half-full load at the Orlando dump last weekend so he could move on. "My boss man said there is a lot more work in Tampa," said Mr. Wise, a sweat-soaked blue bandanna pulled back on his forehead. "He told me to finish up and c'mon."]