Hurricane and Storm Debris Cleanup in Melbourne, FL: What to Do First

Every June the same thing happens on the Space Coast. The season opens, nothing happens for weeks, people relax — then a cone shows up with Brevard inside it and the phone rings off the hook. I have run roll-offs out of Melbourne since 2015, and storm cleanup is the one job where a fast recovery or a miserable two months comes down to the first 72 hours.

Hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30, and the back half — August through October — is when the Atlantic usually gets serious about us.

What Brevard has actually taken

• Matthew, 2016. Scraped up the coast just offshore. Enormous vegetative load county-wide, roof damage, screen enclosures folded flat.
• Irma, 2017. Came up the peninsula and held us in tropical-storm to hurricane conditions most of a day. Power out a week in places, and the right-of-way piles sat on the swales a long time.
• Ian, then Nicole, 2022. Ian crossed the state and gave us wind, rain and flooding on the way out. Nicole arrived six weeks later, in November, when everything was already saturated. Nicole is the one people on the barrier island still talk about — it chewed the beachside dune line from Satellite Beach down through Indialantic, taking seawalls, pool decks, dune walkovers and in places the ground out from under structures.

Two storms in one season, the second hitting a soaked island. That is the scenario this county plans for now.

County right-of-way pickup versus a container on your property

After a declared event, Brevard County activates its debris-management contract. Grapple trucks work the rights-of-way — the swale strip between your property line and the road — and haul what residents have stacked there. It is free at the point of use. It is also slow, it runs on passes rather than appointments, and it is strict about how material is staged. Crews make a first pass, a second, sometimes a third, over weeks or longer depending on the event and how many jurisdictions are chasing the same contractors.

Critically: right-of-way collection is for debris the storm put in your yard. It does not touch anything you carry out of the house. Soaked carpet, ruined furniture, drywall you cut at the two-foot line, the contents of a shed — that is household and construction material. Some programmes take some of it under some declarations, but you cannot count on it and you cannot control the timing.

A container on your property is the opposite trade-off. It costs money, and it is yours: it lands when you need it, sits where you want it, and gets swapped when it is full. Water inside the house, a gut job, a beachside lot with no usable swale, or simply no tolerance for a pile in the yard for six weeks — that is when it is the answer. Most storm work we do is a mix: vegetation to the swale, everything else in a box.

One caveat worth repeating: debris programmes vary by event. What was collected after Ian is not automatically what gets collected next time. It depends on the declaration, the funding and the contractor. Check current guidance with Brevard County, your own city if you are inside one, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management before you stack anything.

How the county wants right-of-way material staged

Grapple trucks are single-purpose machines. A vegetative truck cannot take fence panels, and a construction truck is not stopping for palm fronds. Build one mixed heap and everybody drives past it until you sort it yourself. I have watched that happen on the same street three passes running.

Separate piles, spaced apart, off the pavement, clear of the mailbox, meter, hydrant, storm drain and anything overhead. Nothing in the road or on a sidewalk.

Treat that as a working guide, not gospel. Every declaration has its own instruction sheet and the categories shift, so confirm the current one before you build piles.

Yard trash rides alone

Florida separates yard trash from solid waste. Vegetative debris — fronds, limbs, trunk wood, hedge trimmings, grass — rides as a separate clean load to a yard-waste or mulching facility, never mixed into a construction load. It is why a driver will flag six fence panels thrown on a green box before he hooks up.

It matters at the scale. A green load with construction debris gets rejected or reclassified, which changes the disposal path and the haul. After a storm nearly everyone is doing both, so the clean way is one green box handled as yard waste removal and one box for structure debris. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection sets the framework, and rules get amended — confirm current requirements if you are running a large commercial cleanup.

The classic Brevard storm debris profile

After ten years of this, the pile looks much the same every time.

• Soffit and fascia. Aluminium soffit peels out of the channel and lands in a hedge two houses down. Light, bulky, awkward.
• Screen enclosure cage and mesh. When a cage goes you get bent extrusion, screws, kickplate and a tangle of mesh — see how it loads in our notes on pool and screen enclosure demolition debris.
• Fence panels. Vinyl and wood shadowbox both fold. Vinyl is light and bulky; wood with concrete still on the post ends is heavy.
• Shingles and tile. Partial tear-offs after wind damage are routine, and concrete barrel tile runs roughly three to four times the weight of a shingle square. Size for weight, not volume; the roofing tear-off size guide covers it.
• Sheds. Slab-on-grade houses mean the shed is where the stuff lives, so you get the structure plus everything in it, usually wet.
• Downed sabal palms and live oak limbs. Sabal trunks are dense and waterlogged and eat capacity. Oak limbs are heavy and crooked — cut them short or you haul air.

Document everything before it goes in the container

I have seen more insurance claims hurt by fast cleanup than slow. Once material is in a box and gone, it is gone as evidence.

Before you throw anything, photograph and video the property: wide shots showing the address and the damage in context, then close shots of each item, serial plates on appliances, water lines on walls. Keep shooting as you load, so there is a record of what went in. Contact your carrier before demolition where the policy calls for it, and keep receipts. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation publishes consumer guidance on claims. Policy terms and deadlines vary, so read yours and confirm with your adjuster.

The 24 to 48 hour mould window

In this climate, water inside a wall assembly starts growing something in roughly 24 to 48 hours — the fast end of that in August with no power and no air conditioning. It is why people who wait on the county often gut more house than the neighbours who moved on day two.

Get the water out, get air moving, cut saturated drywall and wet insulation early. Wet carpet and pad on a slab is not worth saving, and cabinet kicks hold water you cannot see. Work from our mould and water damage cleanup guide lays out, and get a container on site the same day if you can — same-day delivery exists for exactly this.

Safety, honestly

Every storm we lose people to the cleanup, not the storm. Assume every downed line is live and stay clear of it and whatever it touches. Do not wade standing water — after a storm it carries sewage, fuel and displaced wildlife. Never run a generator in a garage or a screen room. Chainsaw work under tension is what gets homeowners: a bent limb loaded against a fence will spring when you cut it, and a tree on a structure or a line is a tree company with a crane, not you and a borrowed saw. Pace yourself, too — September heat will put you down faster than the work will.

Sizing, access and lead times

For most single-family storm cleanups a 20 yard is the workhorse: enough for mixed structural debris and household contents without swallowing the driveway. A 30 yard suits a whole-house gut or a cage-plus-fence-plus-roof job. A 10 yard is right for anything heavy — seawall concrete, pavers, pool deck, barrel tile. The size guide for Melbourne homes walks through it, and what can and cannot go in a container in Brevard covers the exclusions: no hazardous material, no refrigerant units, and no asbestos-containing material in any box we own.

Access is what people forget until the truck is out front. Beachside driveways in Melbourne Beach and Indialantic are short, narrow and often shell or paver, and sandy soil over a high water table ruts badly when soaked. We run protection boards as standard — see how we protect driveways on delivery — but a swing area is a swing area, and low limbs or a downed line over the apron stops a delivery cold.

Lead times stretch for everyone at once. Plain arithmetic: the same containers, trucks and disposal sites serve the whole Space Coast, and demand jumps twenty-fold inside 48 hours while transfer stations queue and roads are still blocked. Every hauler is in the same position. The people who get boxes first called before the storm or in the first hours after it.

Pre-season preparation

• Book early. If you are in a known flood or surge area, or you have a big screen cage or an old roof, get in the queue before the cone appears.
• Know your access. Measure the driveway, note overhead limbs and lines, and decide now where a box goes and whether a truck can get in and out.
• Know your HOA or condo rules. Suntree, Viera, Baytree and the beachside associations have placement rules, day limits and sometimes an approval step. Some suspend them after a declared event; some do not. Ask now, in writing — rules get amended, so do not trust last year's answer.
• Clear the shed and garage before June. Half the post-storm volume is stuff nobody wanted.
• Photograph the property annually. Before pictures are worth their weight when you are arguing over what the wind did.

If a storm has already come through and you need a box, call us. If it is April and you are thinking ahead, call then instead — that is the better call and almost nobody makes it. Wes and the crew have hauled storm debris on the Space Coast since 2015, and we know how to get a container to you when all of Brevard wants one. Reach Collins & Co Dumpster Rental Melbourne at (321) 341-7478 or send us the details of the job and we will tell you straight what you need and how fast it can be there.