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Carlisle restoration company heads to Florida to help after Hurricane Michael

200 views · Published 17 October 2018 · 2:02 · Indexed 24 September 2026

Channel: LOCAL 12 · 2018 · News & Politics

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CARLISLE, Ohio (WKRC)- A group from Dry Patrol in Carlisle, a disaster restoration company, is making the trip to the Florida panhandle to help in the cleanup after Hurricane Michael.

Joe Smallwood from Dry Patrol has been surveying the damage in preparation for the crews. This is not his first hurricane cleanup. He said the damage is much more spread out than in previous hurricanes he's been involved in.

"Tallahassee is where you start to see it, all the way down to Panama. It's just you can't go a stretch, and that's two hours without seeing just trees snapped in half, electric poles," Smallwood said.

Smallwood said everyone is waiting on the electricity to get restored.

"Anything from a car into a building, to a house flooding, trauma cleanup, obviously disaster [cleanup] this size," Smallwood said.

Dry Patrol has about a dozen workers finishing up after Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas. They will head to Florida when they're finished, which should be late Friday or early Saturday. The workers are expected to be down there several weeks.

"It's going to be more of securing buildings and doing a lot of demo work. If there's drywall hanging or there's a sign hanging and it's not safe, we'll make sure we focus on that first," Smallwood said.

Smallwood said a lot of the people he's talked with were caught off guard when the tropical storm quickly turned into a hurricane.

"Here, they were expecting a tropical storm and it quickly escalated to just short of a Category 5, so a lot of these people were taken by surprise," Smallwood said. "They don't know what to expect as far as their property, and they're just happy to be alive. They all have story where there's somebody they're close to where they don't know where they're at yet.”

Smallwood said there is currently no internet and the phone service is down. He expects the crew to start working Saturday.

Dry Patrol has been in business about 11 years and employs around 30 people.

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