The devastation in Florida from Hurricane Michael was extensive.

"A lot of the forested areas had trees just snapped in half. It looked like a forest full of toothpicks," said Joshua Feldmann, an infrastructure assessment subject matter expert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Joshua Feldmann was one of 13 people from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Buffalo office to deploy to Florida after the storm. He's been on the infrastructure assessment team for eight years and has been deployed to a number of areas ravaged by hurricanes.

His team was there for three weeks completing assessments on critical infrastructure, like police and fire stations, schools, and hospitals. They surveyed 635 buildings.

"We're FEMA's engineers in a disaster. They work seven days a week, 12-16 hour days, everything from going out to do those assessments, uploading them, completing them, providing the additional analysis FEMA requires,” said Luciano Vera with the Army Corps of Engineers. “We're basically here for one thing and that's to get the public back to normal or give them a sense of normalcy in all this craziness that's going on.”

"Right after the storm, we had to provide some advice on how to provide temporary roofing to keep the water infiltration out of the emergency department, the lab areas, the critical areas of the facility,” Feldmann added. “We worked with hospital management to determine what the impacted areas are, what the potential need is and an interim solution.”

While deployed to Florida, the Army Corps also provided dozens of emergency generators to keep critical functions like hospitals and police departments up and running. They also put temporary roofing on 2,600 homes, with thousands more on the way. 

While Army Corps workers say Florida is well equipped to handle the cleanup effort, they admit it will be a long road to recovery.