Oh, rats!
It’s going to take at least four days for sanitation workers to collect all of that stinky garbage piling up on the Big Apple’s streets after the blizzard, city officials said yesterday — and rodents are feasting on the tons of trash in the meantime.
“The garbage trucks haven’t been here since last year! It smells terrible!” wailed Ray Acosta of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as he gaped yesterday at the hundreds of garbage bags stacked up along South Third Street there.
“The rats are robbing people at gunpoint!”
Up the block at the Morena Beauty Salon, customers such as Haronil Urena, 25, were eagerly awaiting the return of regular trash pickups, which resumed yesterday.
“The smell comes inside the salon, and the garbage draws the rats,” Urena sniffed. “They’re not small rats — they’re big ones. It bothers us.”
The rapacious rodents are just the latest plague to hit Big Apple denizens since Dec. 26, when the blizzard buried the city and Sanitation crews struggled — or dawdled — for days to plow streets across the five boroughs.
The city Department of Investigation is probing claims that some Sanitation supervisors staged a slowdown during the storm because they were peeved about job cuts.
The problematic plowing efforts meant that the garbage — already bulging with Christmas wrapping paper and boxes — went uncollected for a week.
Sanitation officials estimated that as of yesterday, there were 50,000 tons uncollected on city streets.
When Sanitation crews resumed garbage pickups yesterday, they deployed 1,100 trucks, about 100 more than usual for a Monday, officials said.
“It’ll take a few days to catch up, but they’re out there today, and, hopefully, in the next three or four days, it will all be done with,” Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.
Still, Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said that because crews are scrambling to handle the overload, streets that normally see two collections per week likely will see just one and streets that see three collections are likely to get only two.
Doherty said he doesn’t expect recycling pickups to resume until the end of this week or the weekend.
The pickups couldn’t happen soon enough for residents of Washington Heights, where pedestrians warily weaved their way through walls of garbage bags.
“It’s getting harder and harder to walk down the streets. If they don’t clean it up soon, we won’t have any sidewalk left,” griped Noel Castellanos, 28, who was visiting his grandmother on Cabrini Terrace.
“It was really awful when the snow was here, but this sucks, too.”
Sanitation spokesman Vito Turso said the snow-removal efforts have cost the city about half of the $38.8 million it had budgeted for the fiscal year for such purposes. And that figure could grow as private contractors are paid for their work.
Additional reporting by Helen Freund
