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Garbage Collection Has (Kind Of) Resumed!
By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 3, 2011
Modified Jan 3, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 3, 2011
Modified Jan 3, 2011
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Garbage collection resumed at 7 a.m. this morning for the first time since Christmas Eve. Good thing considering the drifts of debris piling up. But before you go and thank your lucky Sanitation stars, don't expect all that trash to just go poof. Like all things in New York, there are complications. Which is good if you are looking to jump out of a window, we guess.
Because the Department of Sanitation still is out plowing the remainder of the Boxing Day Blizzard, only half of the city's trucks are going to be out collecting garbage for the next few days. Folks are asked to now put their trash, including Christmas trees, out on the day they would be collected. But they really don't have time yet for your recycling. Also, they don't know when they'll get to your bags.
“We will be behind,” department spokesman Keith Mellis told the Times. “We’re going to be working on Monday’s material on Tuesday. As soon as we finish Monday’s, we’ll get to Tuesday’s.” Further, "he could not say exactly when trash would be collected because that depended on which districts needed more crews to remove snow."
So your trash will be picked up, it is just unclear when.
Which is all well and good, unless you live in an area where the cops are particularly ticket-y. On our block, for instance, if we leave a trash bag on the street more than six hours before or after our designated pick-up time a neighborhood officer just loves to give our building a ticket. We're hoping he's on vacation this week. If anybody gets ticketed for having their trash on the street, we'd love to hear about it.
And it could be worse. Last year the Upper East Side went three weeks without recycling pickups. Not to mention the 17 day garbage strike of 1981...
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blizzageddon
blizzard of 2010
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Trash Pickup
Garth Johnston
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