Coming To Your Neighborhood Soon...

[bendmz]

Roddy Stinson: Reports coming in from citizens injured by massive garbage cans

Web Posted: 10/07/2007 03:12 AM CDT

San Antonio Express-News

Garbage-can casualties continue to be reported to this desk.
From an 82-year-old North Side woman:




"When I saw the headline on your Tuesday column — "I fell on my knees, and my body went inside the can" — I thought it was about me.
"I stumbled while taking out my garbage, fell down and ended up with my upper torso in the can.

"In the process I scraped the skin off my knees.

"I now have a scar that I will probably take to my grave."

From an 81-year-old South Side man:


"... I tilted the can to move it, and it fell on me and I was cut and bruised pretty bad. I had difficulty walking for a while."
From a woman who didn't provide her age or residential address:


"I had a garbage can accident, just like the lady in the newspaper article. I had to get 10 stitches in my right hand and 10 stitches in my left wrist."
From a 56-year-old South Side woman:


"... The can fell on me and pushed me down. I hit my head on the concrete sidewalk. I saw stars. ... That was in February, and my head still hurts.
"I called 311 and reported what happened, and the operator said it had never happened before. I asked to talk to a supervisor, and the supervisor told me, 'We can't do anything about it.'"

The injured woman recalled those conversations because of this sentence in last Tuesday's column about a citizen who fell while moving her can and broke a bone in her wrist:

"According to Rose Ryan, the city's garbage-collection expert, this is the only reported injury related to the new system."


Incidentally, the elderly South Side man quoted above also noted that his injuries had been reported to a 311 operator, who said that City Hall would send him a report form, "but to this day, they haven't sent anything."
I'm guessing that everyone is telling the truth.

Ryan — whose official title is assistant director of the Environmental Services Department — is well known at this desk for her concern about and quick responses to citizens' complaints.

And there is no reason to suspect that the injured citizens were lying.

None of them mentioned medical bills or lawsuits, and I gathered from our conversations that they mainly just "want them to give me back my other smaller can," as one of them put it.

The problem appears to be a lack of a specific plan (and perhaps a sincere desire) to keep track of the difficulties created by City Hall's conversion to an automated garbage-collection system featuring massive, frail-senior-injuring, small-person-swallowing containers.

When Mayor Phil Hardberger and the 2005-2007 City Council approved the automated system, they stressed that one of the "advantages" of automation was the amount of money that would be saved by decreasing city-worker injuries and compensation claims of approximately $1 million annually.

What they never mentioned was the probability that the gigantic containers required to convert to a once-a-week automated collection would increase injuries to citizens, who have no city medical coverage and who can't file compensation claims.

To atone for that shortcoming, the least that Hardberger and the 2007-2009 council can do is direct city staff to come up with a publicized procedure for reporting and recording automated-system casualties for periodic reviews and discussions of remedies.

OK, enough of the preaching. I have just enough space to report one more can-eating story from a diminutive grandmother who while raking garden waste into her 96-gallon container "got caught up and went down with it, going totally inside the can!

"My grandson, who was talking on his cell phone, said: 'Uh, sorry, T.J., I'll have to call you back. Grandma just fell into the garbage can.'

"I'm sure it will be one of our best memories!"



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To contact Roddy Stinson, call (210) 250-3155 or e-mail [email protected].

[boutons_]

My two city-supplied cans are 3'6" tall. The comfortable handles are about 1" diameter tubes which also serve as the lid hinge axis.

Even with the lid open, no one of my height, and certainly no one shorter, could fall into an upright can. If the can falls over and the lid flops open, someone can fall into the horizontal can? GMAFB

My cans have attached, hinged lids. They are on two wheels and not very heavy empty. I simply cannot picture how people can fall into them.

I call bullshit until someone can show me a video of how these klutzes manage to fall into a 3'6" tall garbage can with a hinged lid.

If some frail, decrepit old people can't handle the weight, I'm sure they have Good Samaritan neighbors, (this is in-your-face, chest-thrusting Christian America, right?) who would be glad to take two more minutes to put an oldster's can when when they put out their own.

I think these new garbage cans providing hands-off pick-up are a superb introduction, but hardly new. The city is to be commended in facilitating re-cycling paper, plastic, and metal. Other cities have been doing this for 25+ years.

There is only one guy, the driver, instead of 1 driver + 2 garbage men, a huge savings. I wonder how long the salary savings will take to payback the cost of the new trucks?

http://www.sanantonio.gov/newsletter/October2006/1006automatedgarbage.asp

[Johnny_Blaze_47]

I agree with boutons.

Also, what exactly is "coming to my neighborhood soon"?

[boutons_]

Read the SanAntonio.gov page I posted. We've had these blue/brown garbage containers for several months in our neighborhood.

One off-setting increased cost is that the new trucks have to travel a route twice to visit both sides of the street. This could be easily be halved by asking everybody to put their garbage containers on one side of the street, alternating sides every 3 or 6 months.

But this alternating sides idea will be too complicated and/or too strenuous for many dumbed-down people who have been spoiled into believing they should expend no effort to live :) .

[Johnny_Blaze_47]

Oh, yeah, we've had them for probably the same amount of time. I wouldn't mind going to one side of the street only for pickup if it'd increase efficiency.

[FromWayDowntown]

I'm with boutons on this one.

The containers have inspired a noticably higher rate of recycling in my neighborhood -- the literature that comes with the containers suggests that as much as 80% of household refuse can be placed in the recycling bin. At the very least, about half of all household trash should go into the blue container, which should actually diminish the weight of the container as it's transported to the curb (in relative terms). And the containers are very easy to wheel to the curb -- far easier to get there, one would think, than a traditional container without wheels (and, it would seem that it would be at least as easy to get to the curb as a traditional container with wheels).

[boutons_]

The biggest problem I have with these containers is that they are ugly and defacing as permanent fixtures next to a house and visible from the street.

I would expect some HOAs to add rules that they not be visible from the street.

[CosmicCowboy]

I hate those big ass cans...and once a week pickup means that your cans will stink to high heaven with rotted garbage in our summer heat. I hear about all the money it will save the city but I don't see them talking about lowering our taxes when they provide less service.

[Johnny_Blaze_47]

The biggest problem I have with these containers is that they ugly and defacing as permanent fixtures next to a house and visible from the street.

I would expect some HOAs to add rules that they not be visible from the street.

Compared to some of the shit my HOA lets go around here, the containers isn't too high on my list... but I do understand what you're saying.

It was like pulling teeth with the HOA to get the neighbors to mow their lawn, remove the trash from their end of the sidewalk (and it's a corner lot, too) and remove excess brush.

We were going through all of that and they end up hitting us with a lawn too long memo when we had cut the grass three days prior and we were in the midst of all that rain.

[bendmz]

Read the SanAntonio.gov page I posted. We've had these blue/brown garbage containers for several months in our neighborhood.

One off-setting increased cost is that the new trucks have to travel a route twice to visit both sides of the street. This could be easily be halved by asking everybody to put their garbage containers on one side of the street, alternating sides every 3 or 6 months.

But this alternating sides idea will be too complicated and/or too strenuous for many dumbed-down people who have been spoiled into believing they should expend no effort to live :) .



hot damn there Mr. Boutons, if I didn't know any better I'd say you sound like one of them there " CONSERVATIVES '......... :clap

[ploto]

My HOA rules already said that garbage cans can not show so people had to find a way to hide them or get them inside.

I agree that I do not see how you could fall into it. You wheel it with the hinge toward you, so even if it fell and popped open, the lid would come at you, not the open side. And contrary to what people think, they are not stacked high and overflowing with trash- at least not where I live. I hope it also encourages people to recycle by limiting the other trash pick up to once a week. I wait and put mine out only when it is full, so mine are not out every time there is pick up. I figure the fewer times they have to pick up, the more money is saved. My trash one goes out probably every other week and the recyclables not even once a month.

[BushDynasty]

That Roddy Stinson is my kind of guy.