Home Care In Milton, WA

TREASURE ISLAND, Fla. — Days after the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck Florida’s Gulf Coast last fall, piles of waste and debris walled the streets of this community.

Furniture, appliances and family pictures were dumped onto the street after the first system’s storm surge washed waist-high seawater through the barrier island. The second hurricane struck just two weeks later, compounding the cleanup effort and further contaminating and soaking through crumbling piles of debris.

The small 1.54-square-mile island would produce over 128,000 cubic yards of debris after the storms — roughly 2 million standard kitchen trash bags worth of waste. That’s about 300 bags per each of the island’s 6,500 residents.

Treasure Island is one of 24 municipalities that make up Pinellas County, and each would work with a variety of private haulers to clean up the millions of cubic yards of waste left after the two hurricanes.

Even for one of Florida’s smaller communities, the process to remove two hurricanes’ worth of debris required two professional hauling companies working around-the-clock for nearly 50 days to haul 7,000 truck loads of trash. Compared to the 36 million cubic yards of waste processed across the state of Florida, Treasure Island is a microcosm of the various local governments and private contractors involved in cleaning the state.

The Washington Post wanted to better understand this complicated process and track individual items of debris. To do that, reporters sought permission from businesses and residents who had thrown out their belongings before sticking Apple Air Tags on 10 items. Starting in October, The Post monitored those items as they moved across southwest Florida.

Three of the tagged items best show the scope and scale of the monumental effort to remove hurricane waste and debris from this community.

The first item tracked was an Avis Acadia Office Chair owned by Paradise Spa, a massage therapy and skin-care business.

Corey Mendel, owner of the spa, had to throw everything out after the storms.

“All the sewers on Treasure Island backed up. And so that created what they call Cat. 3 water,” Mendel said. “Anything that that water touches, we’re told, that has to be discarded because it’ll be, you know, toxic after that point.”

So-called Category 3 water, also known as “black water,” is considered heavily contaminated by pathogens or toxins and can pose a health risk to anyone that comes in contact with it.

Seawater mixed with sewage washed through the entirety of the first floor of Mendel’s spa. Massage tables, a hydrotherapy tub and other treatment equipment that had been exposed were no longer usable.

“I lost about $350,000 worth of assets,” Mendel said.

For more than 40 days after Helene, the office chair sat in the spa’s parking lot until it showed up at the Pinellas County Solid Waste Disposal Complex on Nov. 5 — an unintended landing place.

Under normal conditions, the facility handles municipal solid waste from residential and commercial properties — typical neighborhood garbage. When operations resumed after the hurricanes, the facility continued to accept normal municipal waste. Hurricane debris and waste was supposed to remain under the purview of the cities and their contractors.

The 700-acre facility lies roughly nine miles northeast of Treasure Island and contains Pinellas County’s only landfill. The site also hosts a recycling center, as well as a waste-to-energy facility that incinerates 80 to 90 percent of incoming trash from the state’s most densely populated county.

At full capacity, 3,000 tons of garbage can be burned each day. The incinerated trash then spins a turbine that turns a generator to produce enough energy to power 45,000 homes, according to Paul Sacco, director of solid waste for Pinellas County.

If any hurricane trash ended up there, it was a “curious mishap.” Sacco said perhaps the chair got mixed in with regular garbage.

“We did not knowingly accept storm debris,” Sacco said.

Frank Andolino, a resident of Treasure Island for four years, used a scooter — a 2022 Genuine Scooter RoughHouse 50 — as his main mode of transportation around town.

Andolino stayed in his home as the storm came in, hoping to weather it on the second floor of his building.

“There was four feet of water here, four feet of rushing water,” Andolino recalled. “This was the ultimate.”

The next morning, the scooter was left wedged between his hot tub and a palm tree. The RoughHouse had been completely inundated by corrosive seawater, ruining the internal electronics and engine.

He called his auto insurance company.

“That was an easy fix, you know, they were very understanding and gave me the money to replace the scooter,” he said.

A day after the defunct scooter was tagged by Post reporters, Andolino’s insurance company towed it and dropped it off at the Copart auto auctions lot in Clewiston, Florida, about 140 miles southeast of Treasure Island.

Copart is an online auction house that specializes in used and salvaged vehicles across North America.

After five days on the lot, the RoughHouse was put up for auction. It was listed with an estimated retail value of $2,337.

At first, no bids were made. But on the last day of the auction, someone placed an opening bid of $10. An hour later, the RoughHouse had sold — the final price unknown.

It’s unclear who purchased the device, but on Nov. 1, Andolino’s scooter moved west to Trademark Metals Recycling in Fort Myers. Trademark operates 22 scrap metal recycling facilities throughout Florida and saw an uptick in business after the two storms.

“Appliances, automobiles — what we call sheet iron, so anything that would stick to a magnet” was being brought to Trademark facilities, said Jeff Powers, the company’s operations manager. Powers said the business saw a lot of awnings, garage materials — “what we call white metals, aluminum.”

Before being broken down, toxic materials like gas or mercury switches are removed from machines like the scooter.

“The shredder can shred a car in, you know, three to five seconds,” Powers said.

In the breakdown process, magnets pull out metals that contain a significant amount of iron, known as ferrous metals. “Everything else, the rubber, the plastic, the nonferrous metals, copper, brass, aluminum, stainless … goes down to another conveyor,” Powers said.

The ferrous components of the scooter, like the steel frame, were then trucked to the Nucor steel mill in Frostproof, Florida. Nucor is the largest steel producer in the United States and Trademark is one of its affiliates.

At the mill, furnaces that burn at up to 3,000 degrees melt the scrap that will later be cast into rebar.

The rebar is then sent to construction sites around the state, including for a new Amazon distribution center and a hospital expansion in Fort Myers, according to Powers.

While much of the scooter was melted down and recycled into rebar for new construction, the Apple AirTag, wrapped in plastic and duct tape, avoided the magnets and carried on with the other scrap.

What was left of the scooter — any part not captured by the magnets — was taken to yet another facility. There, another round of sorting pulled out precious metals for recycling or reuse.

A DirecTV Commercial HD Satellite Receiver sat in a sprawling pile of trash out in front of a home on Treasure Island’s Isle of Palms, a man-made strip of land with waterfront views. Hit by corrosive seawater, the simple black plastic box filled with intricate metal components was rendered useless.

After being tagged, the receiver sat curbside on the owner’s property for another two weeks until it was picked up and delivered to the Treasure Island Community Center Park on Oct. 28 by one of the contractor crews responsible for transporting debris.

The park, typically used as a green space for weekend markets and community events, had been designated as a dumping ground for hurricane waste.

Four days later, the receiver was relocated to Largo Recycled Aggregates, a collection facility owned by GFL Environmental Inc., a waste management company that operates many facilities across North America.

Here is where the Apple AirTag’s movement stopped — with it possibly crushed or deactivated in the sorting process.

The journey of the receiver shows the typical cleanup process — with debrispicked up and relocated at an intermediary location before being processed by a series of companies contracted with the city of Treasure Island for proper disposal.

Although the bulk of the debris has been dealt with, some locals say there is still work to be done.

As of about five months after the storm, Mendal said work was ongoing.

“Unfortunately, it took them a long time,” he said, and cleanup wasn’t done.

Andolino said the area didn’t look anything like it did after the storm, with much of the trash moved away. “It’s just very, very slow going,” he said, adding that he believes the process will drag on as residents continue to demolish and rebuild homes.

The city of St. Petersburg, the largest municipality in Pinellas County, has cleaned up over 2 million cubic yards of waste or about 33.5 million trash bags following Helene and Milton. By comparison, 36.18 million cubic yards of debris have been removed across the entirety of the state of Florida since the storms, or roughly 562 million trash bags worth, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

Many of the contracts between these local governments and contractors are supported by federal funding, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursing Florida communities $1.3 billion for debris removal alone following these storms.

As more and more people move to parts of the country increasingly vulnerable to hurricane disasters, complicated efforts to deal with the debris left behind are expected to only grow.