AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) – As residents become more concerned about the ongoing debris cleanup situation, we’re digging deeper into what the city’s plans are and where they stand now.

We are officially on the 50th day of the cleanup in Augusta and Richmond County.

The teams easily collect and grind 35,000 cubic meters of material per day.

It’s a process they say they’re almost ready to move on to the next phase of cleanup.

The biggest question on everyone’s mind is when all the debris will be collected in Augusta.

Steve Cassell of ISM Engineering is in charge of the operation in Augusta.

Despite what you still see on the roads, he says we’re only half way done.

“We have about 135 trucks here and business is going well. But let me tell you, everything will be packed before we leave,” Cassell said.

The crew collected and milled 1.2 million of the estimated 2 million they expected to bring.

Cassell says he understands residents’ confusion about the trucks’ inconsistent locations.

But he says this is due to the unexpected circumstances that come with an operation of this scale.

“Many services are still disrupted. You know, these are abandoned facilities, basically sitting in piles. So they can’t remove them. “If there’s plumbing in there, they can’t pull these piles because it could pull down a pole or something like that,” he said. “We talked to all the drivers. Let’s say you want to go out on the street and shape the street, there are monitors, but each truck has a monitor. There are designated areas that they have to go through as they go. But, you know, these are also the trucks that break down. They have hydraulic problems from time to time. So we had a lot of them crash.

This is a long process that requires the crew to revisit communities several times, depending on what they are facing.

“Usually the logs are the last thing we collect. There’s a special truck for that and we have some log crew that goes around and collects them,” Cassell said.

This is a bigger job than your average garbage disposal job.

It will be difficult to put an exact timeline on it yet, but they are getting closer to finding out what the ending will be like.

“We will complete the first pass and move on to the second pass in many of these areas over the next few weeks. “That will really determine what our final volume will be,” Cassell said.

Cassell says another challenge for them was the rainy conditions that workers began to struggle with.

Thursday’s weather conditions caused crews to collect about 10,000 less debris than usual.

But they say they are still on track to meet the 90-day cleanup goal to receive a 100% federal refund.

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