A Windfall of Work

The Monday after Hurricane Charley hit central Florida, Carol King Landscape in Orlando was running on an emergency generator and their phone was ringing off the hook. Bruce Bachand, the company’s vice-president and COO, says after a day or two they stopped counting the number of calls coming in to his office. “We had to turn people away and focus on our existing clients,” he says, adding that in the week following Hurricane Charley his company received between $250,000 and $300,000 in new tree work alone.

Other contractors are also experiencing this flurry of additional tree removal and clean-up work. For instance, Billy Butterfield, President, Ameriscapes Landscape Management Services in Orlando, expected such a wave of work so he put a plan in place on Thursday before the hurricane hit on Friday so he and his team would be ready for the calls. “We work four ten-hour days, so normally we’re not in on Friday, but in this case we had to work Friday and we had everybody come in on Saturday, and we haven’t worked a Saturday in years.”

Not only did contractors get tree-related work from new clients, but they also picked up the pace to ease the transition back into the offices for their existing commercial clients.

Butterfield says his crews arrived at the client sites at 6:30 a.m. armed with chippers and other debris-clearing equipment. “By Monday, every one of our customers could get in their buildings,” he says proudly.  “Most of our customers couldn’t even tell there had been a hurricane if they were looking at just their building because we had the parking lots swept and all the trees cut down and all the debris either piled by the road, which was about the only place you could get it, or chipped up and hauled off.”

At one job alone, Butterfield says his crew hauled off 8 tons of debris. The only challenge in doing the work was renting some of the equipment, such as high-reaches and cranes, necessary to get the jobs done. “We’re 18th on the waiting list and this is one of our regular vendors where normally we could go pick up something on an hour’s notice,” Butterfield explains.

Another challenge is fly-by-night entrepreneurs who decided the day after the hurricane hit to become temporary landscape contractors and make some money on the clean-up services. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency has approved more than $53 million in disaster aid. “I’ve heard of people paying $2,000 to $3,000 to take down a tree that two months ago would have been $1,200,” Butterfield says. “I tell people that $2,000 is probably all right if the guy’s got insurance.  That’s what it costs if you’re $105 an hour or $120 an hour, to take down one of these large trees. But still, some people are taking advantage of the situation.”

Despite the toll the hurricane has taken on the state, the contractors say they’re optimistic about the future. “It’s a mixed blessing,” Bachand says. “The damage will put us in a crunch for a while to get it cleaned up, and then there will be a lot of new construction and renovation to do. So things are going to be crazy and hectic for the next year, which is another reason why we’re optimistic that we’ll have an outstanding 2005.”
 
“In a couple of months we’re hopefully going to have a heck of a lot of tree planting going on as well,” Butterfield adds. Butterfield says he toured a park a couple of days ago and the trees were already showing signs of new growth. “The hurricane was just like a hard prune,” he says.  “In a way, it was good for them. It took all the dead wood out of the trees - basically, Mother Nature did her thing. The crape myrtles were just flushing like mad and the maple trees had nice new leaves on them. So everything’s recovered, and in two or three weeks down the line, aside from the lack of pretty trees, most of the places are going to look just fine.”