Statesboro's landfill, which also serves Bulloch County, is not accepting any yard waste at this time. In a Hurricane Helene aftermath update Sunday night, the city government asked that residents and businesses place storm debris and yard waste in the public right of way for collection.

Meanwhile, the Bulloch County government — which does not provide door-to-door garbage pickup but operates about 20 solid waste collection centers — started closing the centers for an hour or two periodically, one at a time, to allow crews to remove household garbage while yard waste and other debris continues to pile up. Officials of both local governments are looking into the possibility of hiring a contractor to remove a historic volume of storm debris residents are placing on the shoulders of city streets and county-maintained roads.

The update posted by Layne Phillips, Statesboro's city public affairs manager, made a distinction between storm debris, which is subject to special handling, and the city's routine collection of household waste from curbside polycarts, which continues on its usual schedule. Further, the city asks that residents and businesses divide storm debris into two kinds when piling it along the right of way.

"Debris should be placed without blocking the roadway or storm drains, mailboxes, and fire hydrants," Phillips wrote. "Debris piles should be separated into two categories: construction debris (lumber, shingles, metal) and vegetative debris (tree limbs, leaves)."

But household trash such as spoiled food should be placed, as usual, in polycarts and not in the right of way, she added. The storm debris collection is being handled as a separate operation.

"Your household trash will be collected on your normal collection day," Phillips stated. "Waste and debris placed curbside will be collected as Public Works crews can get to it. Please be patient as we process unprecedented levels of debris at the landfill."

County waste centers

Meanwhile, household waste containers in Bulloch County's rural solid waste collection centers have quickly reached capacity as residents bring in loads of items such as spoiled food cleared from refrigerators and freezers after power outages lasting several days.

The same convenience centers have been receiving trailer- and truck-loads of yard waste and other storm debris, which are piling up. So the county crews need time to tidy up that material and empty the "bulk waste," or household garbage, containers, said county Public Works Director Dink Butler.

"We're starting at the busier centers and working our way out, and we're doing that for public safety and our employees' safety and liability as well," Butler said. "What the problem was, there was so much activity in the centers that we didn't have time to work and do the cleanup like we should.

"So the only way we could manage that was to close them while we're there," he explained. "It takes us about an hour to two hours to clean up a center, and once we get it clean, when we leave, the gate is back open and the public can go back to using it."

Unfortunately, the progress of the crews from one center to the next is "such a moving target," Butler says there is no way to publish a schedule.

"We're hauling the bulk (household) waste, and that's the priority to move, and hopefully by Wednesday we'll be able to start gathering up the yard waste," Butler said. "Meanwhile we're just trying to keep it pushed up as tight as we can to give people room."\

For background, the Bulloch County government operates no landfill facility of its own. The city of Statesboro operates both the inert waste landfill, ordinarily used mainly by the county and contractors for construction and demolition debris, and a household waste transfer station. A contracted hauler moves garbage from the transfer station to a large commercial landfill in Chatham County.

Seeking FEMA payback

But neither Statesboro nor Bulloch County is sending their accumulating storm debris to that landfill or the city's own inert waste landfill.

For now, the debris is "being staged at a different area," as Butler explained, "hopefully with the possibility of recouping some reimbursements from FEMA."

That's the Federal Emergency Management Agency, conduit for federal disaster relief cash that has reimbursed the city and county for storm cleanup efforts in the past. 

Whether the vegetative debris will eventually be burned or chipped or placed in inert landfills, it must be measured and documented to qualify for FEMA reimbursement, he said.

Debris contractor

In phone interviews Monday, Butler revealed, and Statesboro Public Works and Engineering Director John Washington confirmed, that city and county staff are looking into the possibility of hiring a special contractor to remove the debris from roadsides.

To that end, the county is also encouraging residents and businesses to place storm debris along the shoulders of county-maintained roads for later pickup. This is not something the county government does on a regular basis, but it has done it after some major storms.

"If it's a county-maintained road, we're going to pick it up from the right of way," Butler said. "We'll get this contract service in here and they'll help us. We'll just pick up from the right of ways."

This reflects a change of plans by the county, which originally did not intend to pick up debris from Hurricane Helene, until officials realized that the storm left a mess of historic proportions. "And this will help relieve some of the strain on our collection centers," Butler said.

The county may seek the services of the same contractor the city hires, he said.

"We are considering a contractor to do all cleanup of roadside debris because it's a very complicated process to file a claim with FEMA," Washington said. "You have to do quite a bit of extensive documentation with respect to photographs, weights, locations, other technical data such as GPS coordinates."

It wasn't on the agenda yet, but he said the contract service would probably be discussed at Statesboro City Council's 9 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 1, meeting.

A further concern is that the city's inert landfill is nearly full already.

"We can't allow all of this debris to go to the inert landfill because we're in the process of designing an expansion of the inert landfill, and if all this debris had to go there it would probably exceed our permit capacity," Washington said.

Butler said the volume of material from Helene "extremely surpasses anything that we've had to deal with as far as debris management in the past," and Washinton thinks it is at least comparable to Hurricane Matthew. 

After that Oct. 7–8, 2016, storm, Statesboro and Bulloch County's debris removal lasted through December.

From Helene, "We continue today to clean debris off of local streets," Washington said Monday. "There were still power lines down that were live, so we were limited as to what debris we could get off the road, and I do know that Georgia Power has contractors on-site."

Power company progress

Indeed, both Georgia Power and Excelsior Electric Membership Corporation reported progress restoring power in the area Monday.

As of 8 p.m., Georgia Power's interactive online outage map showed 6,597 of the company's 22,553 customer locations in Bulloch County, inclusive of Statesboro, still affected by outages. Immediately after the storm passed, 19,153 of those customers had been without power, and the number had been 9,225 customers as of 5 p.m. Sunday.

Right after the storm, 100% of Excelsior EMC's 25,451 customers were without power, the rural electric cooperative's President and CEO Greg Proctor said during a briefing Sunday afternoon.

In a posting on its Facebook page around 3 p.m. Monday, Excelsior reported that power had been restored to "just shy of 10,000" of those customer locations, referred to as members.

An operator at Excelsior's headquarters said that about 15,000 remained to be restored Monday evening. Excelsior serves customers in Bulloch, Bryan, Candler, Effingham, Evans, Emanuel, Jenkins and Tattnall counties.

A Facebook posting around 8 p.m. described the EMC's continuing challenge: 

"As we push on through this restoration effort, we are still facing massive amounts of damage in the form of fallen trees, many broken poles, and lines down at every turn. While we have restored power to a large number of our members, we still have a long way to go. We are celebrating our successes, but we hope you know that we are bearing down on the end goal in mind: 100% restoration."