Commercial Garbage Haulers Routinely Violate City Curfew

By STEPHEN SIEGEL
Falls Church Times Staff

March 10, 2010

It’s 5:30 a.m. Do you know where your commercial garbage truck is?

It may be prowling the streets of Falls Church City, waiting for just the right moment to wake up the neighbors.

The trucks occasionally lurk in parking lots, their lights off to disguise their presence. Other times, they just approach quickly without any fear they’re being watched. Then, with stunning suddenness, they strike.

Bang!

Adults, jarred out of a deep sleep, groan. Babies cry.

Bang! It happens again.

It sounds like a war zone, or a brutal traffic accident, as metal and metal collide with mechanized force. But it’s just another night in Falls Church City.

The noise is the sound of commercial garbage trucks servicing strip malls and stores in the Broad Street and Lee Highway corridors. The specialized vehicles, called “front-loaders,” use giant arms to pick up the big dumpsters, lift them over the driver’s cab, turn them upside down, and bang them into the top of the truck to ensure that every last piece of foul and filthy garbage moves from the one bin to the other.

It’s so loud that it can be heard hundreds of feet away. It can be heard even in City homes tightly closed up for the winter. And in part because of that volume, the City, like many jurisdictions, has a curfew that prohibits the haulers from doing pickups prior to 7 a.m. weekdays and 9 am on weekends and holidays.

But it’s rarely enforced, and the garbage companies continue to do it during the middle of the night with apparent impunity, according to interviews with neighbors who live near the City’s commercial areas.

AAA Trash did just that at 6:25 a.m. March 9. The driver picked up a garbage dumpster at the West End Shopping Center, 1055 W. Broad Street, and emptied the garbage with the typical, shuddering bang, the noise echoing several blocks away. A witness heard a cacophony of other banging further west on Broad Street at the same time, but was unable to see which companies were the offenders in those situations.

AAA did not return a call asking why they chose to violate the city curfew. But they’re not the only ones doing it.
Potomac Disposal Service (PDS) has awakened neighbors on Ellison Street many times. A witness told the Times she spotted a PDS truck picking up garbage, also at the West End Shopping Center, at 5:30 a.m. Feb. 16. Earlier in the winter, when a woman walked by with a dog at 5:30 a.m., a PDS truck turned off its lights in an apparent effort to hide the huge vehicle from view in the pre-dawn darkness. And yet another PDS truck picked up at the same location before 6 am Jan. 26, according to a different witness, who was awakened by the racket.

“This morning before 6 a.m. the damn garbage truck was collecting,” wrote an angry and tired Mara Peltz via email that day. “I’m so fed up with that happening when I’m asleep.”

Sometimes, it’s even earlier. PDS was seen banging the dumpsters at Taco Bell, 935 W. Broad Street, at 2:30 am last summer, and Waste Management, a national garbage company that services many City businesses, has been observed servicing Rite Aid, 1003 W. Broad, as early as 3 a.m.

It’s convenient to live near a commercial area, where one can walk to stores, restaurants, and transportation, but there is a downside: there are noises and activity nearby. People who make the choice to live near commercial areas know that, but they may not have known they would be shaken out of their sleep by a garbage pickup that sounds like nearby gunfire.

Rob Kahr, a City resident, got used to hearing the noise from both garbage pickups and deliveries at his previous home in the Greenway Downs. He made sure to live further away this time. “Nighttime/early morning pickup in areas where commercial abuts residential is not compatible,” he wrote via email. “Noise laws do exist, but you would be hard-pressed to get a cop to wait for a truck and write a citation.”

The city is aware of the problem, but it’s unclear what efforts they’ve undertaken to put a stop to it. In response to an inquiry from the Falls Church Times, Sandy Ingram-Salang, of the city manager’s office, reports there were nine noise complaints last year against sanitation trucks, but no penalties were imposed. She adds companies were contacted and that “a solution was found” in some of the cases. She did not explain what the solution was. But in any case, the problem of curfew-violating garbage pickups continues to fester.

Some garbage companies claim to be unaware of the problem. Shannon Smith, general manager of PDS, said in an interview: “We follow the code to a ‘T’,” adding, “We want to have a good name and reputation out there.” But their reputation may be tattered by their own actions, which, despite Mr. Smith’s assertion, frequently fail to follow the code.

The garbage haulers prefer to operate during the night or early in the morning to avoid traffic, said Lisa Kardell, a spokeswoman for Waste Management. That makes sense, but residents object not primarily because of the time of day, but because of the noise resulting from the banging of the dumpsters.

Yet the city doesn’t seem sympathetic to that concern.

Asked for the city’s position on the banging, Ms. Ingram-Salang said, “It is industry standard for the [trucks] to allow the top of the dumpster to fall open and allow its contents to spill into the hopper.”

That is correct, but it doesn’t answer the question. The garbage companies can follow the industry standard practice without banging, and sometimes they do. Asked via email for clarification, Ms. Ingram-Salang did not respond.

A more direct and sympathetic response comes, ironically, from Waste Management’s Ms. Kardell, who said flatly: “They’re not supposed to be banging.” She said last month that she would pass along that information to drivers at their weekly staff meeting.

But as of March 10, they continued to bang.

The problem isn’t unique to Falls Church City. Fairfax County residents suffer from the noise as well. In Fairfax, solid waste division spokesman Brian Worthy said the county has created decals, that garbage companies must pay for, which are placed on dumpsters near residential areas. The decals specify that those dumpsters cannot be serviced until after the curfew is lifted each day.

Another solution would be to require the haulers to use “rear-load” garbage trucks, like those Falls Church City uses for residential pickups, to service commercial garbage dumpsters adjacent to residential areas. Those don’t bang. But they’re not as big, nor as efficient, because the drivers must get out of the truck at each stop or have a partner who does. Front-loaders have only a driver.

Rear-loaders already ply some areas of the city, because some city businesses have their dumpsters in tight spaces that the big and noisy front-loaders can’t reach. And they’re not that much less efficient, because drivers still have to get out of the front-loaders when the dumpsters are in an enclosure.

The City also could prohibit the banging, which is so loud it might even violate the City noise ordinance’s existing decibel standard. It’s unclear if it does, as no one has ever taken the time to measure it with a decibel meter. But the simplest solution, and the cheapest, which perhaps makes it appropriate for our current moment of austerity, would be for the garbage companies to follow Ms. Kardell’s lead and just decide not to bang.