Houston Chronicle
By Matt Stiles
October 5, 2005
The city's top trash official says pickup schedules disrupted by the winds of Hurricane Rita might return to normal by next week.
In the meantime, crews assigned to pick up garbage, yard waste and heavy trash are working overtime and weekends to handle 200,000 cubic yards of tree limbs, building materials and other debris strewn as the storm passed Sept. 24. That's equivalent to a typical month's worth of heavy trash collection.
"We are pretty close to being back to normal," Solid Waste Management Director Thomas "Buck" Buchanan said Tuesday. "We're beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel."
A status report:
- Automated collection - trash picked up weekly from the large, black bins - is mostly back to normal, though some neighborhoods are still behind, Buchanan said.
- Extra yard waste from the storm - leaves, twigs, small branches and other items that can be hand-collected - is almost removed. Crews will be returning Wednesday and Saturday this week to neighborhoods they've missed, he said. Buchanan urged residents to bag smaller items to speed the cleanup.
- Heavy trash - large items and debris, such as tree branches, that isn't bundled - is on schedule in the city's southern neighborhoods. Northern areas are at least a day behind, he said.
- The department also has deployed a private contractor, DRC Emergency Services, LLC, to collect an estimated 25,000 cubic yards of debris in the Kingwood area. The company will switch to other parts of the city if needed, he said.
Returning to a normal trash schedule would mean the city's suspended curbside recycling program also could be restored soon.
Until the program returns, solid-waste officials ask residents not to trash their recyclables. Collect them for later or take them to one of the area drop-off centers.
The storm-cleanup effort, which the city handles even for neighborhoods and properties that normally rely on private trash companies, actually has been slowed because the storm dealt only a glancing blow, Buchanan said.
The city has a plan, he said, to bring in an army of precontracted companies to deal with a direct hit from a Category 3 storm. Such a storm could leave more than 15 million cubic yards of debris, the city estimates.
But with the lesser hit, the city was left to handle the situation mostly on its own, leaving a limited number of trucks and personnel to do the work.
That's led to a flurry of calls from residents with questions, said Gloria Bingham, who runs the city's 311 helpline system.
Many of the calls - about 1,100 since the morning after the storm - concerned the suspended curbside recycling program.
In the weeks before the storm, the city had been developing a plan to boost participation in the program, which by some estimates is as low as 20 percent. Recycling has dropped more than 13 percent in recent years - from 11,770 tons in 2001 to 10,210 in fiscal 2005.
Buchanan said he's concerned that some neighborhoods, especially those that already had low participation, might abandon the program altogether because of the service suspension.
He said the department feels pressure from those frustrated by the suspension and that his crews are working hard to get the program back to normal. The city will announce when that happens, likely within a few weeks, if not sooner, but it all depends on the cleanup.