Hazards come down first, brush goes second

What we do when we pull up

The first walk around is not cleanup, it is sorting. A limb lying flat in the grass is not going anywhere and can wait. A limb hung up in the canopy with nothing holding it but a strip of bark is the one that comes down first, because it will come down anyway, on its own schedule, probably onto somebody. Same for anything resting on a roof, a fence line, a pool cage or a service drop. We mark the hazards, work out what order they can be released in without pulling something else loose, and start there.

Then it is a question of what is under the pile. Storm debris lands on things. Screen enclosures, irrigation heads, gutters, downspouts, a fence that is bent but still standing. If you drag a forty foot pine top across a yard without lifting the butt end you will plow out sprinkler risers the whole way. So the heavy pieces get cut down to sizes a couple of people can actually carry or roll, and they travel the shortest line to the truck, not the most convenient one.

Cut and haul happens last, and it happens all the way. Brush goes out, the wood goes out, and then somebody walks the lawn looking for the small stuff, because that is what the mower finds later. A yard that is genuinely clear looks boring when we leave. That is the point. One of our reviews puts it as "they were quick, thorough and even went the extra mile with last minute add-ons", and that last mile is nearly always the raking.

• Hung limbs and broken tops taken down first
• Debris off roof, fence and pool cage
• Big wood cut to carryable pieces
• Brush and wood hauled off the property
• Yard raked and walked before we leave

Laurel oaks, pines and palms after a blow

Each of the trees around here fails in its own way, and that changes the cleanup. A laurel oak sheds. The trunk stands, the canopy lets go of whatever was already weak, and you end up with heavy horizontal limbs scattered wide and often one or two still lodged overhead. Oak is dense and it does not break down small, so most of the work is cutting it into pieces that move rather than dragging lengths across a wet lawn.

Pines are a different animal. Sand pines and slash pines sit in loose soil on a shallow root plate, so in a real wind they tend to go over whole or snap partway up and leave a spike with a hinge of fiber holding the top. That hanging top is the most dangerous thing in most yards after a storm, and it is the one homeowners walk under to look at the fence. Leave it and the next squall drops it. A tipped pine also lifts a plate of soil and roots that has to be dealt with, not just sawn off at the ground.

Sabal palms mostly throw their skirt. Dead fronds and seed pods come off in sheets and pack into the hedges, the pool screen and the gutters. It looks like the least serious mess in the yard and it is the one that clogs drainage right before the next band of rain. We pull the skirt material out of everywhere it wedged rather than just clearing what is lying in the open.

What the housing stock here adds

Most of the older housing around Palmetto and Bradenton is concrete block with stucco, a low pitch roof, and a lanai or pool cage off the back. That aluminum cage is the thing that gets hurt. It is built light on purpose, so a limb that would bounce off a shingle roof punches straight through screen and bends the frame, and then the limb is sitting on a structure that cannot hold it. Getting weight off a damaged cage takes cutting the limb into pieces from the outside in and taking the load off gradually, never a single cut that lets the rest of it drop.

Then there are the mobile and manufactured homes, common on the lots out this way, with carports, tie downs and metal awnings. Those take debris badly. An awning will hold a limb just long enough for somebody to assume it is safe. Roofs on those homes are thin and they do not take a person walking on them, so anything up top gets reached from a ladder or from the tree side, not by climbing across the panel.

Fences here are mostly vinyl or wood panel between block columns or set in sandy soil, and a fallen limb bends a section without snapping the posts. If you cut the limb loose in the wrong order the fence springs back and takes out the panel next to it. Slow and in sections is the only way that ends with a fence you can still stand back up.

Wet ground, heat, and what goes wrong

The ground after a storm here holds water for days. St. Augustine over sand turns into something that takes a tire print and keeps it, and a heavy truck or a loaded trailer parked on that turf leaves ruts you will be filling in for months. So the machine stays on the drive or the road where it can, the work comes to the machine, and the wet part of the yard gets handled by hand even when that is slower. That decision gets made looking at the lot, not from the driveway.

Skipping steps after a storm shows up in a specific way. The brush gets taken and the hanging limbs get left, because the hangers are the hard part and the brush makes the photo look finished. A month later a calm afternoon drops one on a car. The other common miss is a leaning tree with a lifted root plate that somebody trimmed and walked away from, still leaning, still lifted, now lighter on one side and less balanced than it was before anyone touched it.

Heat sets the pace of all of it. Working a chainsaw and dragging wood in Florida humidity is hard on people and hard on equipment, and tired crews are how the mistakes happen. One of our reviews describes it: "Jacob and his crew worked diligently, even through the rain." We would rather work into the evening on a job than rush the part where a limb is under tension over somebody's roof.