Hurricane Helene cleanup crews rush ahead of Milton

• The remnants of Hurricane Helene could make Hurricane Milton even more dangerous.
• Milton is expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday, the second major storm in two weeks.
• The region scrambled to pick up as much debris as possible before it was 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 fight to clear before you get there.

In Tampa, where Hurricane Milton is forecast to make landfall on Wednesday, the city worked on the surface to clean up leftover debris from Helene before Milton’s winds and flooding turned the city’s wreckage into major safety hazards.

At its height, Helene produced the largest 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 Tuesday afternoon — could bring double that, with waves of up to 15 feet and wind speeds of up to 165 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Helene’s surge flooded thousands of homes in the region and created a massive accumulation of debris that the city is now scrambling to collect.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference Tuesday that the state has deployed more than 300 dump trucks to collect debris in the worst-hit areas. And, he added, the state Department of Transportation alone has collected more than 1,200 truckloads of debris, totaling 22,000 cubic yards, in just the last 48 hours.

Nick Friedman, co-founder of College HUNKS Hauling Junk & Moving said after Helene, “it felt like a war zone for the next few days, where literally everyone’s belongings in their homes were boarded up because their homes were flooded.”

Friedman’s company, which has 200 franchise locations in the U.S. but is headquartered in Tampa, was hired by the city of Tampa to help with debris removal efforts.

“People who have spent their lives in Tampa have said they’ve never experienced anything like this,” Friedman told Business Insider.

Just as people were starting to get their bearings and take action to clean up the mess, Friedman said, that’s when the second storm was forecast.

“And so people started really scrambling because I would say every other house you drove by had at least a garage’s worth of stuff on the dash,” Friedman said.

Friedman’s company has been operating 50 waste and removal trucks since it was leased by the city, picking up about 2 million pounds of debris a day, he estimated.

All of that debris is dumped into landfills that must be open 24 hours a day, DeSantis said Tuesday.

Now, it’s even more urgent to get debris out of the way before Milton hits, Marla Spence-Howell, communications coordinator for Tampa’s Solid Waste and Environmental Program Management, told BI.

Any debris—fallen trees, drywall, appliances, broken furniture, closets, mattresses, for example—that is left on the streets when Milton hits could cause major hazards.

“With winds over a hundred miles, those things are going to turn into projectiles and be scattered all over the place,” Friedman said, adding, “It’s definitely not going to be safe if these things hit your house or hit your window. definitely a safety hazard, but it’s definitely going to be a messy cleanup process.”

It’s not just hurricane-force winds that can make debris more dangerous—floods can also pick up objects and push them around, Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, researcher and director of 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.”

That creates a compounding effect that makes everything more expensive — and more dangerous, Schlegelmilch said.

In the worst-hit regions of the state, debris removal will continue around the clock “until it’s no longer safe to do so,” DeSantis said Tuesday.