Time For Spring Cleaning Crews Concentrate On Collecting Debris
Buttercups aren’t the only things blooming on the spring landscape.
Paper, plastic, aluminum and tin - litter is everywhere, rotting along the roadside, caught by wind on barbed-wire fences and draped from streamside trees that were submerged during recent high water.
Twenty-seven years after the first Earth Day, America remains a nation of litterbugs. That’s apparent in early spring, when the snow recedes, baring four months of accumulated crud.
In Coeur d’Alene, the problem is compounded with nature’s own refuse. Street crews spent Monday combing roads for ice storm leaves and limbs, their first day of spring cleaning. They’ll continue for another month.
The effort is so massive, the city street department has stopped doing just about anything else, said public works director Rodger Lewerenz.
“We’re putting our street striping on hold,” he said. “Pothole patching. Road grading of shoulders and alleys. We’re putting that off while we’re doing the pickup.”
He expects it to be one of the city’s biggest ever, hauling off up to 350 truckloads of debris.
Crews typically don’t have to deal with limbs as a part of the annual street cleaning, he said. That’s an ice storm bonus. And the leaves - left over from the city’s fall collection cut short by the ice storm - are wet, soggy and heavy.
The 14 members of the street staff already have worked their way up as far as the south side of Sherman. To have the crews pick up leaves, residents are asked to pile the leaves in the street a foot from the curb. That way, water flow to gutters won’t be cut off.
In Sandpoint city parks, the leaf cleanup never even got under way before winter hit. And cleanup is not ready to start yet.
Trash and leaves still are buried under the snowpack, said parks director Maurice Dunn.
He said Sandpoint likely gets its share of trash. “The wind blows trash around,” Dunn said. “It blows trash clear across the lake.”
The first hints of thaw are just happening, and Dunn said if what he’s seen so far is a clue, there’s bound to be both trash and natural debris encrusted under that snowy coat.
“There’s a lot,” he said.
“Some of it is litter that blows out of people’s cars. A lot of it is debris from trees.”
Sheets of plastic, wilted cardboard and chunks of insulation from the Spokane Valley Mall construction site clutter a half-mile of the Centennial Trail. It was there even before Sunday night’s windstorm.
“I can assure you that it … will be cleaned up. Period,” JP Realty President Rex Frazier said Monday when told about the mess. Frazier’s Salt Lake City company is building the mall.
Trees and shrubs along several miles of the Palouse River are adorned with shredded plastic, like grotesque Christmas ornaments.
The source: an illegal dump about five miles downstream from the town of Colfax. The streamside dump, along with the “No Dumping” sign that marks it, was inundated when the river flooded in January, sending civilization’s discards toward the Pacific.
Fishing season at the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge south of Moses Lake means trash in the backcountry, said wildlife biologist Randy Hill. Styrofoam bait containers become as common as sagebrush each March in the refuge.
“There’s just a general disrespect” for the land, laments Hill. “People say, ‘I’m done with it, I’ll leave it here.”’
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