A mountain of debris from Hurricane Milton has been growing in Charlotte County since the storm hit just over a month ago.
It’s three football fields long, a football field wide and 15 feet high, but this isn’t the final resting place for the pieces of homes that the storm destroyed.
High above Charlotte County, a pile of storm debris blends into the landscape around it.
Look closer, and you’ll find pieces of neighbors’ lives. Mattresses, shoes and toys are mixed into the mountain of memories.
“It can be a little emotional, you know,” Richard Allen shared. He’s the solid waste operations manager in Charlotte County. “It's like, you know, people's livelihood, people's memories and things like that that are just in that, in that debris pile.”
Allen was born and raised in the county. Milton isn’t his first hurricane. He said this storm ranks in the top five of his storm memories because “this is the first storm that we've such a surge in this community that I can recall.”
That storm surge entered Charlotte County streets the night Milton moved in. In the weeks since, Allen and his colleagues spent their time moving all this debris off the streets and into collection piles like this.
“What we're at right now is called a ‘DMS,’ a disaster debris management site,” explained John Elias. He is the Charlotte County Public Works director. “We bring it here, drop it on the ground where it's where it's crushed up and reduced more.”
This is one of multiple sites throughout the county where they are taking that debris before it goes to the landfill. In the three weeks after the storm, they've collected enough debris to cover more than four football fields 10 feet high with debris.
“We concentrate on mental health awareness,” Elias said at the pile, “because the reality of it is it's depressing. You see so much damage. You see and you feel for the people that their houses were damaged. We have employees whose houses that were damaged during this.”
All that debris eventually ends up at the landfill on Zemel Road. A worker there told us it stands at 95 feet tall right now. As more storms pile up more debris year after year, leaders like Elias are planning ahead for what’s next once this landfill reaches capacity.
“We think right now, based on the last analysis we did, that our current landfill, which is permitted to be 130 feet high, will last this till about 2030,” Elias said, “which means we have to start planning for what we're going to do two to three years in advance of that.”
One option they are considering is expanding the landfill’s footprint by 20 to 25 acres at a rough cost of “about a million and a half to $2 million an acre,” Elias said.
The other option is to build this pile even taller. “Our current landfill may be able to go as high as 195 feet, which gives us 65 feet of additional air space. That would extend us out probably at least 11 more years and buy us more time before we have to actually expand,” Elias added.
While leaders work out those decisions, these trucks continue the process of cleaning up 18 tons at a time. They are moving neighbors’ memories to their final resting place as the community, made up of people like Elias and Allen, works to move on from Milton.
Elias said they plan to present their ideas for the future of the landfill to county leaders this week. He also said they hope to have debris pickup completed in about 90 days. Find a link to the Charlotte County storm debris dashboard here .