SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — As mountains of garbage piles up from Hurricane Irma, counties across Florida say that companies they hired to remove storm debris won’t show up because they can make a lot more money doing the work in South Florida.
The Herald Tribune reports a half-dozen trucks arrived this week as reinforcements to help thinly stretched crews cleaning up thousands of tons of storm debris scattered across Sarasota County after Hurricane Irma.
But they didn’t pick up a thing.
Instead, those trucks rumbled south, where other counties are paying double Sarasota’s pre-storm contract rate of $8 per cubic yard of debris, they told Sarasota County officials.
Officials in six counties — Alachua, Hendry, Indian River, Manatee, Orange and Sarasota — complained to the state about problems with companies that refuse to haul debris.