ORANGE PARK – Late last month an unnamed afternoon storm blew through Orange Park, upending trees and damaging roughly 40 homes.

Late last week, the debris finally left most neighborhood curbsides, much to the delight of residents who spent nearly a month petitioning disposal officials and county authorities for assistance.

“It finally was picked up but it was only after a social media revolt,” said Richard Crews, a resident of the Grove Park neighborhood who, along with neighbors, consistently reached out to officials to get piles of tree debris off their lawns. “Why the neighborhood had to practically revolt through social media to get even a response is, I think,” worth looking into.

Crews and his neighbors believe the county and the Town of Orange Park should have done more, sooner, before the piles in front of their homes turned into brittle, rotting wood. Crews said he was dismayed jogging through his neighborhood and seeing trash bags and stacks of lumber day after day with no apparent change in their size.

So-called “updraft” storms such as these present a conundrum for municipal and county authorities, however, because the methods of funding cleanup often aren’t uniform and clear.

“After Hurricane Matthew, the county contracted debris haulers,” said John Ward, Clay County Emergency Management Director. “[Hurricane Matthew] was a [Federal Emergency Management Agency] declared storm, so contractors went countywide and it cost us in the area of $1.7 million to do that. Obviously, that’s not something we do on a regular basis. Unfortunately, lately we’ve seen an uptick in these updraft events.”

Keystone Heights had a significant storm in February, and Lake Asbury met a similar fate at the end of last year.

Mostly, the costs for these repairs and disposal fall on residents during these events, Ward said. Two weeks ago, the Clay County Board of County Commissioners waived fees for residents who wanted to take their debris to the Rosemary Hill Landfill in Green Cove Springs.

This is the route the county has historically turned to for events like these. However, the sheer damage the May 31 storm caused limited the success of this strategy, so the county eventually bypassed the usual service standards put in place in their contract with Advanced Disposal – that govern maximum size of debris removal – and contracted with a another company that used a claw truck to remove the debris from residents’ yards.

The usual service standards set five cubic feet as the maximum amount of debris Advanced Disposal will pick up in their contract. However, Crews said Advanced Disposal was not picking up even that amount of waste.

“I guess the bottom line is if they had picked up the five cubic feet on week one and week two, by week three it would not have been this gigantic pile of limbs,” he said. “Advanced Disposal did not do their job – therefore the county did not do their job, so they have to be held to task.”

Advanced Disposal and the contracted claw trucks removed much of the last of the debris Saturday, but questions remain on what to do with similar events in the future.

“I think this is the first time we’ve done a separate contract without a federal disaster declared,” said County Manager Stephanie Kopelousos. “What was important to us is getting someone out there as quickly as possible.”

Kopelousos said there isn’t a value yet on how much the contracted cleanup cost the county.

“Each time we do it, we’re probably going to get better and better at it, but the goal is going to be responding as quickly as possible when it meets the threshold,” she said.