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Hurricane Matthew recovery continues countywide
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Ted O'Neil
Updated: Oct 19, 2016, 2:14 PM
Published: Oct 19, 2016, 2:15 PM

The cities of Pembroke and Richmond Hill along with Bryan County continue to clean up debris left behind by Hurricane Matthew.

The first round of collection in the city of Richmond Hill should be completed by next Friday.

Charles Heino of Enviroworx, a private company the city contracts with for public services, updated city council at its meeting Tuesday night.

“Everything west of U.S. 17 and north of Highway 144 should be done with a first pass by Friday,” he said. “We’ve got three crews going and we’ll move from the Bottom Village into Live Oak, Sterling Woods and then Piercefield, and from there the Timber Trail area and Richmond Hill Plantation.”

Heino said so far some 2,300 cubic yards of debris has been picked up, or about 60 dump truck loads. The city is waiting on further instructions from FEMA before picking up carpeting ruined by flooding and other non-yard debris.

Bryan County on Monday was declared eligible for individual disaster assistance by FEMA. Fire Chief Ralph Catlett said a team from the agency was in Richmond Hill Tuesday surveying damage, while Assistant City Manager Scott Allison added that the city’s building department has been working to determine residences that are uninhabitable.

“I think that helped with the declaration,” he said.

Bryan County had already been approved by FEMA for public assistance to help pay for the costs associated with emergency response during the hurricane and debris removal.

“We’re very fortunate to have had the people working during this time that we had,” Mayor Harold Fowler said.

Catlett added that he thinks Richmond Hill was “three to four days” ahead of other municipalities in responding to the post-hurricane mess.

“That Saturday morning 144 was completely blocked and by noon it was passable,” he said. “If you can’t get bucket trucks in there, they (power companies) can’t restore power.”

Efforts also continue to restore J.F. Gregory Park. Fowler said about 120 trees were damaged along the trail behind the Wetlands Center.

City Manager Chris Lovell said that while regular trash and recycling collection in the city has resumed, some residents may have been confused about a directive from Bryan County. The county has suspended recycling and stated people could use both their trash bin and recycling bin for household trash until further notice. That is not the case in the city.

“People in the city shouldn’t be putting trash in their recycling bins,” Lovell said. “We’re picking it up anyway but only this week.”

Efforts also continue in the city of Pembroke and the unincorporated portions of Bryan County.

Bill Collins, emergency management director for Pembroke, updated city council there last week. The meeting was postponed from Oct. 10 to Oct. 13 as city hall was without power.

“The employees of the city of Pembroke, every one of them, have all just done a tremendous job,” he said. “We seem like we’ve done this a lot and we haven’t. There are things I would do differently since I know more now, but for a city our size we have done excellent.”

Collins said he has been meeting with FEMA and GEMA about procuring recovery funds.

County Administrator Ben Taylor said the county has so far collected 2,000 tons of debris and is about 60 percent done.

“We’ve made a big dent but we’re asking people to be patient,” he said. “It is a tremendous task and we still have a ways to go.”

Taylor said not only have county DPW employees been working on the collection, but GDOT, Turner and Montgomery counties and the city of McDonough have sent crews to help.

“We’ve even got employees from the recreation department and animal control working on it,” he said. “We’ve taken an all hands on deck approach.”

Taylor added that recycling collection in the county remains on hold until further notice.

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Later yall, its been fun
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Ted O'Neil
Updated: May 23, 2018, 6:03 PM
Published: May 23, 2018, 6:05 PM

This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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