Fort Myers

Working in Fort Myers

We work Fort Myers regularly, mostly around the downtown River District along First Street, the Cleveland Avenue corridor and Colonial Boulevard.

Sandier ground than Miami-Dade, with the Caloosahatchee fronting downtown and a historic core running older lines under narrow rights of way. Storm recovery work has been a large part of the picture across Lee County in recent years.

Who calls us here

River District independent restaurants in older buildings, hospital and college food service, and commercial drainage across a large recovering market.

What we run in Fort Myers

Fort Myers gives us the oldest downtown in Southwest Florida and the newest problems around it. The River District along First Street is brick buildings and independent kitchens sharing service alleys, so grease trap work there is close quarters and the lines behind those buildings have been carrying more than they were built for since long before anybody here was born. We pump, we jet, and we document. Away from downtown, Cleveland Avenue and Colonial Boulevard are commercial corridors with plaza basins that fill with sand, and the sandy ground out here moves differently than the rock we dig in at home. Storm recovery has kept excavation demand high across Lee County, and a lot of that is exposing utilities in ground that got rearranged.

Getting a truck in

Downtown is the constraint. The River District has narrow one-way runs, brick surfaces, on-street dining and events most weekends, so we work it off hours and stage where we are not blocking somebody’s only exit. Alleys behind First Street are shared with dumpsters and beer deliveries, and there is rarely a place to turn around, so backing in is the plan rather than the surprise. The corridors out toward Colonial are simple truck work, wide aprons and real service drives. Bridges across the Caloosahatchee shape the route to and from the Cape, and running loaded, we pick the crossing before we start, not at the light.

Through the year

Winter into spring is the busy stretch here, with seasonal residents and visitors filling the River District and the hospital and college kitchens running full through the terms. Summer thins the dining rooms and opens the maintenance window, which is when we prefer to do jetting and basin work. Rainy season brings daily storms and sand-loaded runoff into every plaza inlet along the commercial corridors, so basins get cut before the wet months. And hurricane season is taken seriously in this county for good reason. When it turns, we run around the clock.

Fort Myers sits in Lee County, and everything on this page runs out of our yard in Miami. See the rest of Lee or look at the trucks working.

One call covers both halves of the job in Fort Myers

Ask most contractors in this city to pump a trap and daylight a service line in the same week and you are hiring two companies, coordinating two schedules and chasing two sets of paperwork. We built this one so that is a single call.

A new catch basin is the clearest example. Setting the structure is drainage work, but the hole it goes into sits at the low point of a lot, which is exactly where irrigation, lighting conduit and sleeves tend to run. Somebody has to expose those before a bucket finds them. One call, one crew, and nobody pointing at the other guy.

The same logic runs the other way. A restaurant with a line that keeps blocking has a jetting problem and a trap interval problem, and treating either one alone means doing it again in a few months. Because the crew that clears the line is the crew that services the trap, the conversation covers both instead of stopping at the edge of somebody’s scope.

What you get in writing

Every environmental service in Fort Myers generates a manifest showing what came out and where it went, before and after photographs, and disposal records from an approved facility. That file is what an inspector asks for, and it is the reason the haulers permit and the dumping permit matter rather than being background detail.

On the excavation side the deliverable is different but the principle is the same. An exposed utility gets measured for depth and offset, identified by size and material, and photographed, so the drawing can be corrected before a trench crew corrects it the expensive way. Everything we run is available across this area, and telling us the job is the fastest way to find out which part of it you actually need.