PASCO COUNTY, Fla. — About a dozen homes in the Magnolia Valley neighborhood of Pasco County now have a close-up view of a hurricane debris landfill.
The site is a sorting location for trash ripped out of flooded homes, but its proximity to people's backyards raises questions.
"What are you doing about the environment? How are you protecting our health? What are you doing about rodents that are coming from these piles?" Donna Parker said. "We were told that no garbage bags would be in here. It's full of black garbage bags, which means there's the possibility that we'll have a rodent population back here. What are they doing to protect us?"
Parker's home is a couple hundred feet from the mountain of debris. We spoke to her in her backyard, where the view once looked over a vacant grassy lot. Now, it's machinery, dump trucks, and anything else that flooded from the storms.
"The smell is horrendous. Taking the dog out in the evening is horrible," Parker said. "I have asthma. The air quality is affecting my asthma."
ABC Action News reporter Michael Paluska took their concerns to Pasco County officials.
"We've talked to the residents out there, and that site will fill up; it will go down. It's going to be like that for probably about three months, four months," Andrew Fossa, emergency management director for Pasco County, told Paluska. "When these trucks come in, they're offloading debris, but if they find any hazardous waste, it automatically gets removed off the site and brought to our landfill. Nothing sits on the site permanently there at all."
Fossa said the sites are critical for rapid debris removal, staging, and sorting. The neighborhood's location has been designated a landfill site for years and is inspected routinely.
"DEP goes out there and inspects them. The Army Corps of Engineers has been out there inspecting them. We've had OSHA out there to inspect it for safety," Fossa said. "It's been repeatedly checked, and they sometimes don't even announce. They'll just come out, and we haven't had one violation yet."
"It's heartbreaking that this came because of people's homes being destroyed," Paluska said to Parker.
"I feel bad about, you know, what the other people have been through. And like I said, we understand. We got to work together, but logistically, this could have been done a lot better than it was with all of the land that they have," Parker said.
While many children have plenty of presents under the Christmas tree, that's not always the case for foster children. ABC Action News reporter Keely McCormick spoke to a 16-year-old who spent most of her life in and out of foster care about life in the system around Christmas.
