PASCO COUNTY, Fla. — About a dozen homes in Pasco County’s Magnolia Valley neighborhood now have a close-up view of a hurricane debris dump.

The site is a place for sorting waste taken from flooded houses, but its proximity to residents’ yards raises questions.

“What are you doing for the environment? How are you protecting our health? What are you doing for the rodents that come out of these piles?” » said Donna Parker. “We were told there would be no trash bags here. It’s full of black trash bags, which means it’s possible we have a rodent population here. What are they doing for us protect ?”

Parker’s house is a few hundred yards from the mountain of debris. We spoke to him in his garden, where the view once looked out over a vacant grassy lot. Now it’s machines, dump trucks and everything else that flooded because of the storms.

“The smell is horrible. Taking the dog out at night is horrible,” Parker said. “I have asthma. Air quality affects my asthma.”

ABC Action News reporter Michael Paluska voiced his concerns to Pasco County officials.

“We’ve talked to residents, and this site is going to fill up; it’s going to disappear. It’s going to be like this for probably about three or four months,” said Andrew Fossa, Pasco County emergency management director. Paluska. “When these trucks arrive, they unload debris, but if they find hazardous waste, it is automatically removed from the site and taken to our landfill. Nothing is left on site at all permanently.”

Fossa said the sites are critical for rapid disposal, staging and sorting of debris. The neighborhood location has been designated a landfill for years and is inspected regularly.

“The DEP goes out there and inspects them. The Army Corps of Engineers is out there inspecting them. We’ve asked OSHA to inspect it for safety reasons,” Fossa said. “It’s been verified multiple times, and sometimes they don’t even announce it. They just reveal it, and we haven’t had a single violation yet.”

“It’s heartbreaking that this is due to the destruction of homes,” Paluska told Parker.

“I feel bad, you know, about what other people have gone through. And like I said, we understand. We had to work together, but logistically it could have been done a lot better than with the entire territory that they did,” Parker said.