Illegal dumping is an issue here. A lot of rude people from the flatter areas drive up here late at night to dump their rubbish. The worst culprits are landlords who just cleaned out a unit and don’t want to be responsible and take the garbage to a dump and pay a fee to have it properly dealt with.
A few months ago, an area of the road we live off–which already had enough garbage dumped across it that the mess was visible on Google Maps–got another load of stinky trash, including some mattresses and couches. This particular section of road runs along an active creek that is about 30 or 40 feet below the level of the road.
Just before that load of garbage appeared, a separate gathering of garbage bags showed up about 300 yards away on another section of road, and while residents reported both messes when they appeared, we were totally unsuccessful in getting any county assistance cleaning up the messes. Santa Clara County is currently trying to get its act together to better assist residents with issues such as this, but they have to wrangle several departments into the mix, and as anyone who has worked in a complex bureaucracy or large corporation can tell you, coordinating between all the mini-fiefdoms involved in such a project is like herding sheep and goats and cows combined. Adding to the confusion, our road is private and not administered or maintained by the county, so while our requests for assistance have been handled sometimes, more often than not they are refused.
Hearing nothing from the county for several months, I organized an event in which 20 residents showed up, and we managed to remove everything over the course of two weekends. And I mean everything. Bags of garbage, boxes of rotting paperwork, old mattresses, a plastic children’s play set, armchairs, couches, old dressers, broken TVs, refrigerators and other appliances–it all came out.
Now this was the 14th dumpster I’ve ordered in the last two years from Ecobox. When I called to arrange pickup (they knew this dumpster was for the neighborhood cleanup and not for random garbage the previous owners of our property had let accumulate over 40 years), I was honest and explained we had fished out several mattresses and couches from the mess and they were in the dumpster. Thankfully the manager was very understanding, and since I’m a very good customer he didn’t charge extra to handle final disposal of those items. Normally we just have wood and metal–with the occasional old bathroom vanity (there were two in one of the stable stalls we cleaned out last year) or bit of concrete still stuck around a post we pulled out–so this load of total junk was quite different from our past topped up dumpsters.
Going forward I’m proposing to county that they could duplicate this idea and setup a small program to help residents with the cost of the dumpster and simple supplies like heavy duty garbage bags. Thus more “neighborhood” groups might be willing to do this sort of thing in affected areas. The organizer would then provide receipts, a list of names of who attended and visual documentation of what was done. Then county would reimburse the most of if not all of the cost. That idea is a long way off and right now our little group of neighbors (there are just 45 or so houses on our road and half of them are below the area we just cleaned up and thus wouldn’t know of it unless they drove up here.)
Before and after shots, then one of the full dumpster:
And one last note, our new little tracked dump truck, Dumpy McDumpface, proved incredibly useful the second weekend. The first Sunday concentrated on the garbage nearest the road, and while that involved getting down a somewhat steep 10ft slope, ropes made it fairly easy. The next Sunday we worked further down, closer to the creek, about 20 feet below the level of the road and the slope was too steep to just haul things directly up to the road. On the first Sunday our little mini truck was useful, as I could drive it in from a level opening about 200 yards away, but turning about was difficult and it couldn’t carry much. I drove Dumpy down the next Sunday, and in just a half-dozen trips between the garbage area to the more level access point, we got everything up and out and into a couple of waiting pickup trucks (one with a trailer), which ferried the junk the mile or so to our waiting dumpster.
The only difficult part was that Dumpy doesn’t move very fast uphill, and with just two relatively flat sections between the cleanup site and Purgatory, getting home was a slow crawl most of the time–a very slow and shaky crawl, as it was first gear up the steeper inclines and Dumpy on asphalt is a very jittery beast.
Footnote: it’s amazing the progress we’ve made in a year getting to know the neighbors.