While debris remains on curbs throughout the city of Port Arthur, Matt Lucas said the pickup is going as well as could be expected.
And Lucas should know.
He is the project manager for Crowder Gulf, the company tasked with overseeing debris pickup and he has 35 years of experience collecting debris all along coastal communities following storms.
Crowder got to Port Arthur On Sept. 4, Labor Day, and he said crews started picking up debris by the end of the week.
In that time trucks have hauled in 240,000 cubic yards of debris working from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. seven days a week.
Lucas said the work has been going well and without any interruptions. That said, he did acknowledge that he lost trucks and drivers his company subcontracted to Florida following Irma, but in the past few weeks, he said those trucks have been coming back and he’s ramped up his workforce.
“Up through the last week, we added four to 10 assets,” he said.
Assets are trucks, and he said people from Houston and surrounding areas have driven in to assist in the cleanup. Of course, Lucas has put people from Port Arthur to work, too, and he said the project hired 175 of them along with 50 people from outside the area.
But, while Lucas said the debris cleanup has been going “absolutely awesome,” there are critics. Houston’s mayor announced last week that debris contractors had finished the “first pass” through the city while the first pass deadline in Port Arthur is Nov. 15. Critics on social media complain that compared to Houston, the Port Arthur cleanup is moving too slowly.
However, Lucas said the first pass deadline does not mean that most of the city has not had at least some debris pick up. To the contrary, Lucas said most of the city has had its first pass.
“The second pass has started already,” he said. “We have substantially completed our first pass.”
Lucas said the reason the first pass deadline was set so far in the future is to make sure elderly residents have a chance to get their debris to the corner.
The fact is, he said, there are many residents who have not gutted their homes yet.
“We’ll go down a street and there will be 100 homes on it and only 60 homes have put their C and D (construction debris) on the curb,” he explained. “This is because the people in the other homes may be elderly and may not have the physical capability to do it and they’re still waiting for a church group or volunteers or family to help them,” he said.
Lucas said crews are picking up most everything on the curb, aside from hazardous chemicals that cannot go into the landfill. These will be picked up from a licensed waste disposal contractor. On Friday crews began collecting white goods like refrigerators and other big appliances.
After the Nov. 15 deadline, Lucas said he thinks it will only be a matter of a couple of weeks before all the streets are mostly clear again.
“I am shooting for substantial completion by Thanksgiving,” he said.
In the meantime, while residents may be sick of the debris piles there is one small upside. Lucas said all of Port Arthur’s waste is going into the local landfill, meaning they are collecting the dumping fees.
All total, Lucas estimates the city will have generated 600,000 to 800,000 cubic yards in waste.
Or, to put it another way, $3.5 million in landfill revenue.