Last Chance For Debris Pickup

The city of Tulsa started the last pass of the ice storm cleanup on Monday. Trucks will canvass the neighborhoods for the third and final time. The News on 6's Emory Bryan reports, it may seem like forever, but it's really been just over 60 days since the contractor started working in the neighborhoods. The job isn't done, but finally, it's close.

The piles of limbs are few in Tulsa, where most curbsides are clear of ice storm debris.

"We have some people we actually did miss, or we couldn't get the pile for some reason the first two times through. So, that's the reason for the third pass, to get everybody who for whatever reason hasn't been picked up yet," said Paul Strizek with the City of Tulsa Public Works.

Giant truck loads of limbs are still being delivered to Johnson Park. The wood is then loaded into a grinder that can reduce logs into pencil sized pieces, and they're running around the clock. The wood chips are hauled out by the semi load.

Up until now, most of the final product of this operation, the mulch, was trucked to a site in Sand Springs. Now crews bring a lot of it down to Bixby, to a sod farm on the south side of the Arkansas River. This part of the operation will take at least several more months.

The job of the limb pickup, the hauling and mulching, and the monitors who watch it all happen has already cost the city of Tulsa $12 million. It's expected to total $14 million once the job is done.

Many of the smaller towns around Tulsa are done with the cleanup, but it continues in Broken Arrow, where they expect to finish by April 15th.

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