Miami Beach

Working in Miami Beach

We work Miami Beach regularly, mostly around Ocean Drive, Collins Avenue, Washington Avenue, Lincoln Road and Alton Road.

A barrier island with the water table right under it and salt in everything. The city has spent years raising roads and adding pump stations because of tidal flooding, and the Art Deco district’s narrow rights of way leave very little room to work. Most kitchens here are served off an alley, at night, or not at all.

Who calls us here

Hotel kitchens, beachfront restaurants and the alley-served kitchens of the Art Deco district, nearly all of them needing overnight service windows.

What we run in Miami Beach

Miami Beach is night work. Hotel kitchens and the restaurants along Ocean Drive and Lincoln Road cannot have a vacuum truck parked out front at dinner service, so we pump traps and jet lines after close and are gone before the breakfast crew shows up. Grease is the dominant job here by a wide margin. The other steady piece is catch basins, because this island floods on a clear day when the tide is right and an inlet packed with sand does not help anybody. Excavation happens too, mostly small potholing where a contractor needs a line found under a sidewalk without cutting into utilities that are already fighting salt.

Getting a truck in

Everything crosses a causeway, and that decides the schedule before anything else does. The MacArthur and the Julia Tuttle back up, and getting a loaded tanker off the island at the wrong hour costs an hour. Art Deco district kitchens are served off narrow alleys shared with dumpsters, delivery vans and valet, so we work them overnight with a spotter and keep the hose run short. Collins and Washington have almost no legal place to sit a truck during the day. Condo and hotel loading docks have height limits worth confirming before we roll, and some buildings only permit service work in a set window.

Through the year

King tides in the fall push water up through the storm system and out of the inlets, and a basin full of sand makes that worse, so fall is basin season here. Wet season storms do the same thing from the sky side. Tourist volume is the other clock: kitchens run flat out from the holidays through the spring, so traps need shorter intervals in that stretch and can stretch out a little in the deep summer. Hurricane season has hotels clearing drainage and locking down loading areas well before anything makes landfall.

Miami Beach 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 Miami Beach

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 property manager in Miami Beach calling about a parking lot that holds water after every storm frequently turns out to have two problems: basins full of sand, and a structure that has settled or cracked below the surface. The first is a cleaning. The second needs somebody who can excavate around whatever else is buried at that low point without cutting it. 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 Miami Beach 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.