Kendall

Working in Kendall

We work Kendall regularly, mostly around Kendall Drive, the Dadeland area at US 1, and the Palmetto and Don Shula expressway approaches.

Kendall is unincorporated Miami-Dade, so the county administers it directly rather than a city hall. Suburban ground with the usual shallow water table, and a share of the older property here has been part of the county’s move off septic.

Who calls us here

Chain and big-box restaurants along Kendall Drive, hospital and college food service, and shopping-plaza drainage.

What we run in Kendall

Kendall runs on shopping plazas, and plaza work is its own thing. A single center along Kendall Drive can have six or eight kitchens tied into a shared line, so when one tenant neglects a trap the whole run backs up and the property manager is the one calling us. We pump the traps, jet the shared laterals and keep records so there is no argument about who was serviced when. The same properties own the parking lot drainage, which means basin cleaning goes on the same visit. Institutional kitchens at the hospitals and colleges are steady high-volume work. Excavation here is mostly utility locating on commercial retrofits and on residential property where a lateral or an irrigation line needs finding.

Getting a truck in

Kendall is unincorporated Miami-Dade, so the county handles permitting and right of way rather than a city hall, and knowing that saves a phone call. Physically the work is easy: plaza lots have space, and most traps sit in a rear service area with a driveway wide enough for the tanker. The problem is traffic. Kendall Drive and the US 1 approach at Dadeland are among the more punishing corridors in the county, and a job that takes an hour can take three if we route through the middle of the day. We work the plazas early morning before the anchor stores open, and use the Don Shula and Palmetto approaches to move between stops.

Through the year

Wet season fills plaza lot basins fast because there is so much impervious surface and the water table sits close underneath, so there is nowhere for it to go but the storm system. Property managers who clean before June rarely call us in a panic in August. Hurricane season brings a rush of preparation work across these commercial properties. Restaurant volume stays fairly level through the year since this is a residential trade area rather than a tourist one, though school and university schedules move the institutional kitchen volume noticeably.

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

One call covers both halves of the job in Kendall

There are plenty of capable vacuum companies and plenty of capable excavation companies. What is rare in Kendall is one outfit that does both, off one roster of trucks, under one set of permits. That was a deliberate choice rather than an accident of how the company grew.

Take a blocked kitchen line. Clearing it is a jetting job. Finding out why it keeps blocking can mean exposing the lateral, and if that lateral runs under a finished surface next to other buried services, the digging is the careful part. Those are usually two vendors and two schedules. Here they are one visit.

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 Kendall 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.