‘Round One’ of debris removal completed|[10/22/05]

Published 12:00 am Saturday, October 22, 2005

Contractors to be used to clean up larger trees, limbs

The city’s initial pickup of heaps of debris lining Vicksburg streets and sidewalks since Hurricane Katrina was completed Friday, city officials said.

Large piles stacked up following city workers’ outside-in sweep of the city this week, however, will require future attention, said Public Works Director Bubba Rainer, and the city will have to negotiate contracts to finish removing large trees and limbs and debris that remains ensnared in treetops.

Email newsletter signup

Sign up for The Vicksburg Post's free newsletters

Check which newsletters you would like to receive
  • Vicksburg News: Sent daily at 5 am
  • Vicksburg Sports: Sent daily at 10 am
  • Vicksburg Living: Sent on 15th of each month

&#8220We’re just not set up to deal with large trees,” Rainer said. &#8220We don’t have people qualified to climb trees and cut down limbs. That’s kind of a specialized item.”

Rather than send city trucks back out on routes they’ve already covered, Rainer said, the city wants residents with remaining debris or with piles amassed following &#8220round one” of the pickup to call the city at 601-636-3411. A crew will be dispatched, he said.

It could be another month or more before the process of contracting out and removing damaged and leaning trees and hanging limbs is completed, said Landscaping Department Director Jeff Richardson, who is handling the city’s contract negotiations for the job. Much of the holdup, he said, is that contractors are busy already doing similar work on private property.

&#8220We hope to be done with it in the next 30 to 45 days,” Richardson said. &#8220There’s no timetable. We’re going to get it done as soon as we can. Contractors are very busy.”

The job of clearing Vicksburg’s roughly 20,000 cubic yards of tangled limbs and tree stumps moved roadside by residents had been contracted out by the city to Maynord Landscaping, which began picking up debris Sept. 26. Owner Dudley Maynord dropped the project two weeks later on Oct. 13, citing financial losses and difficulty obtaining trailers and other equipment after his trucks were turned away from a city-arranged dump site.

The cost of the cleanup was originally estimated to be $250,000, said Mayor Laurence Leyens. He said most or all of the Hurricane Katrina-related debris-cleanup costs or other city programs, such as operating shelters for evacuees, would be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The city can receive 100 percent federal reimbursement for the pickup until Oct. 28, a deadline state legislators have been working to convince President Bush to extend. If the president doesn’t move the date back, state and local governments will have to pick up large portions of the cost.

Some major corridors already funded by the federal government’s Department of Transportation will be reimbursed by Congress through the DOT instead of FEMA to avoid &#8220commingling funds,” Richardson said. In Vicksburg, those roads would include Washington Street, Halls Ferry Road and Porters Chapel Road. Richardson estimated removing leaning trees and hanging limbs along these roads will cost $14,000.

After taking over the project from Maynord, the city dispatched as many workers as it could make available, from the departments of Public Works, Right of Way, Street, Landscaping and Gas, Water and Sewer. Twenty-five to 30 workers made up six crews in all, said Assistant Director of Public Works Walter Bliss. Public Works had two crews, he said, one working from the north and one from the south toward the center of town.

The department &#8220gave a truck or two or three and whatever we could put with them, like a front-end loader,” to physically remove the debris, he said.

Because city equipment and workers were used during normal work hours, Bliss said much of the labor and transportation costs would fall under the usual payroll. Most involved worked around their usual jobs.

&#8220If they’re called about a water problem, they’ll quit and go do that and come back,” Bliss said. &#8220We’ve got city employees on the payroll and they’re working anyway…we should incur a little overtime costs, but that’s about it.”

Street Department worker Marcus Opperman said he’d started work at 6:30 each morning since the city took over the removal late last week, going until 5 each afternoon, including weekends. He usually pours concrete, Opperman said, but the last week had been consumed almost entirely by stumps and limbs.

&#8220We haven’t really done too much other than this,” Opperman said as he blocked the Halls Ferry Road entrance to Marcus Street Wednesday and watched a front-end loader scoop from a 15-foot-high mass of limbs, dumping the debris into a flatbed trailer on back of a city truck. &#8220They put everything into getting this up.”