Storm Debris Cleanup: What We Haul, Where It Goes and What Your Adjuster Wants

The storm has moved on and your yard, your driveway, or the private road into your neighborhood is buried in what used to be trees, fence, and somebody's roof. You need it gone, and you need to be able to prove to an insurance company what was there and what it took to move it. Those two things pull against each other if you start in the wrong order. Here is how we run a storm cleanup so you get both.

Photograph everything before anybody touches it

Before a machine, a chainsaw, or a helpful neighbor with a truck touches anything, take pictures. Wide shots from the road that show the whole property. Closer shots of each pile, each downed tree, the fence it landed on, the shed it crushed, the driveway it washed out. Get something recognizable in the frame, the house, the mailbox, the street sign, so nobody can argue later about where the photo was taken.

We take our own set when we arrive and again when we leave. But yours come first, because ours start the day we get there and the adjuster is going to want to see what it looked like the day after the storm. Once a pile has been pushed into a windrow, nobody can tell whether it was one tree or six.

What we haul

Downed trees on the ground, whole or in pieces. Limbs and brush. Stumps that came up with the root ball when the tree went over, along with the crater they left. Fence, decking, sheds, roofing, siding, and the rest of the building material a storm pulls off a house and scatters across a yard. Sand and mud that washed onto a driveway or across a yard from somewhere uphill.

Our excavators and skid steers do the lifting. An excavator will pick up a whole trunk and set it in a truck in one move, which matters when the alternative is somebody cutting it into rounds with a chainsaw and carrying them one at a time. A leaning tree that is still rooted can be pushed over and pulled out from the ground. What we do not do is climb. A tree hung up over a roof or leaning into another tree needs a tree service with a bucket or a crane, and anything lying across a power line is not ours to touch, you handle that with the power company before we come near it.

Where it goes

Vegetative debris and building debris go to different places, so they get loaded separately. Trees, limbs, and stumps go where they can be ground. Roofing, fence, and the rest go to the landfill or a transfer station. Mixing the two turns a cheap load into an expensive one, so we keep them apart on the lot and on the truck.

Our yard is at 3125 River Rd in Navarre, and running trucks out of there keeps the hauling short on most of the coast. The same pit is where the fill comes from when a driveway needs rebuilding, so we can haul out and haul in on the same trip instead of paying for empty miles.

Washed out driveways and private roads

A gravel driveway on a slope can lose its whole surface into the ditch in one storm, and a private road serving a dozen houses can end up with a gap nobody can drive across. Rebuilding it is grading work. We pull what is left back into shape, bring in fill from our pit to rebuild the base where it washed out, crown it so the next rain sheds off the sides instead of running down the middle, and put rock back on top.

On a private road or in an HOA, the cleanest way to do this is one contractor for the whole street. One mobilization, one set of machines, one pile of paperwork for the association instead of a dozen households each hiring somebody with a trailer. If the road belongs to the association and the yards belong to the owners, we can split the tickets and the invoices so each party has its own file. Our storm debris removal work is set up for exactly that.

What your adjuster wants

We are not adjusters and we cannot tell you what your policy covers. What we can tell you is what makes a claim go smoothly, because we have been on the contractor end of enough of them.

Your photos from before anything moved. Ours from before and after. A load ticket for every truck that left the property, showing the date, what was on it, and where it went. An invoice that breaks the work out by what was done, hauling separate from grading separate from fill, instead of one lump number. And a licensed contractor's name and license number on all of it. A cash job with no paper trail is hard to get paid on, and the adjuster is not going to take your word for how many loads left.

Keep all of it in one folder and send it in together. In our experience the claims that arrive as one complete package get handled, and the ones that trickle in one photo at a time sit.

Before you hire anybody

After every storm, trucks with out of state tags show up in every neighborhood. Ask for a license number and check it. Ask where the debris is going, because a pile dumped in the woods down the road has a way of coming back to the property it came from. Ask for load tickets before the first truck leaves. Anybody who bristles at those three questions has answered them.

NOBL Sitework is a licensed general contractor (CGC1537340) hauling storm debris and rebuilding washed out ground across Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, Escambia, and Bay counties. If your property took a hit, call us at 850-238-3307 and we will come walk it with you, take our own photos, and tell you plainly what it will take to clear.