Adams Sanitation Hurricane Policy
Adams Sanitation strives to give our customers the best-possible trash service, regardless of the circumstances. This means we will do our best to give you top-notch despite hurricanes, tropical storms, flooding, tornadoes and whatever else Mother Nature throws at us.
In order to provide the best possible service to as many customers as possible, we have adopted the following policy for hurricane response. We constantly monitor weather forecasts to ensure that we are prepared for a storm and will be able to restart service as soon as it is safe.
Pre-Hurricane: 4 Days Before the Storm
96 hours [4 days] prior to a possible hurricane event in Santa Rosa or Okaloosa County we will do the following:
Approximately four days prior to the possibility of landfall, Adams Sanitation will communicate to customers via email, social media, and adamssanitation.com our company response plans as the direction and intensity of the storm become clearer.
Cart Safety for Evacuees
Customers who evacuate will be asked to wheel their carts indoors before they leave in order to prevent damage, destruction, or disappearance. We may not be able to replace lost or damaged carts in the immediate aftermath of a storm.
24 Hours Before a Storm Hits
We will stay in contact with our customers through social media, email and our website.
Taking Trucks Off the Roads
Our trucks will generally continue their regularly scheduled trash or recycling pickups until six hours before a tropical-storm-force winds of 25 miles per hour or greater affect north Santa Rosa and Okaloosa County. We will take our trucks off routes six hours before tropical-storm-force winds hit our area because our trucks are top-heavy and don’t deal well with wind. We don’t want to cause any accidents right before a storm!
Additionally, getting trucks off the road gives us enough time to shelter the trucks at our facility (our a staging facility further inland in the event of a severe storm) and get our employees home safely. We can’t pick up trash after a storm without trucks or people!
Taking Your Carts To Safety
Once it looks like we are going to be hit by a storm, we ask that you prepare to take your trash cart into a protected area like a garage or covered patio six hours before heavy winds are supposed to enter the area. By this time, we will no longer be picking up trash or recycling. Bringing in your trash cart ensures that you still have a trash cart after the storm passes through (they are heavy, but they can still fly around in heavy winds) and it will ensure that trash in the cart will not get strewn about the neighborhood during a storm and that you have a cart for us to service once the storm passes.
After a Tropical Storm or Hurricane
After the storm has passed, the real work begins. Adams Sanitation has a specific role in getting the community back on its feet – and we plan to execute this mission to the best of our ability. We will thoroughly communicate Our plans for restarting service as soon as possible after the stomr.
Damage and Operability
Immediately after the storm, we will make an operability assessment. This means ensuring our employees and their families are safe. We take our responsibility to our employees seriously, because we care about them as people first and employees second. We will next assess any damage to our facility, our trucks, and other equipment we need to pick-up trash.
County Decisions
While we are performing damage assessments, we will be in contact with the local public works departments. In Okaloosa County and Santa Rosa County, we will be in touch with the roads division in order to determine what, if any, roads are impassible due to damage from the storm and the status of the landfills and transfer stations that .
are vital to our operation. Until the landfill and transfer stations reopen,, we cannot pick up trash from your home.
Rest assured, we will be working to encourage the local government to reopen the landfill and transfer stations at the earliest possible time so that we can start operating again.
As soon as we have information about our workforce, equipment and information about the landfill – we will communicate this information to you and let you know what our plan to restart operations will be..
Post-Storm Pick-Up Policy.
In the event of a declared disaster, Adams Sanitation will temporarily restrict collections to “In-cart” only. Temporarily limiting collections to only whatyou can fit inside your cart in the immediate aftermath of a storm will be critical to ensuring trash collection for all our customers. Our priority in the aftermath of a storm is to pick up residential household trash.
For this reason, we will not make bulk or yard waste pickups after a storm if there has been a declared disaster, nor will we pick up bagged trash by the side of the cart. During a declared disaster, large amounts of bulk and yard debris can be expected to be place by the road for collection by FEMA or County debris contractors. These materials are not covered by your regularly monthly household trash collection and would quickly overwhelm our ability to provide reliable service to all of our customers.
Additionally, we may suspend our recycling service in the aftermath of a storm, in order to allow our crews to focus on household trash collection and to allow our recycling customers to use their recycling carts as a way to eliminate excess household trash that may accumulate in the aftermath of a storm.
While we would love to clear the entire service area of debris and destruction ourselves after a storm, we simply do not have the capacity to do so. For that reason, we will leave the cleanup of storm damage and debris to the professionals with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They have both the financial, logistical and manpower resources to clean up storm debris. This includes, per our usual policy, construction and demolition debris – as well as tree limbs and branches, and other debris caused by a storm.