Oct. 10, 2002 – When a team of enforcement officers took on the task of removing abandoned vehicles from the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie, it sent the group leader on a trip down Memory Lane.
Among the 40 abandoned cars hauled away in the last week under the direction of the Government House Abandoned Car Task Force, spokesman James O'Bryan said, he came face to face with an vintage Volvo that once belonged to his father.
"We made a move on what would be the eastern side of the Lionel Roberts ballpark and we removed a considerable number of vehicles in that area," O'Bryan said at the end of the day on Wednesday.
Task force personnel also loaded hundreds of axles, tires and engine blocks into a Public Works truck and drove them off to the Bovoni landfill.
The pre-election campaign to improve the quality of life for residents of St. Thomas also yielded drums of used motor oil and a rotting mahogany tree that was sitting in a patch of oil-soaked ground.
The task force involves the Police Department and enforcement agents of the Public Works, Planning and Natural Resources, Licensing and Consumer Affairs, Health, Housing Parks and Recreation and Agriculture Departments, and the Fire Service. Agriculture "came in handy where the tree was concerned," O'Bryan noted.
The cleanup effort in Hospital Ground took about a week, and the task force left behind citations and warnings to property owners to get rid of such eyesores on their own property or face fines of up to $200 a day. They also were warned not to move wrecks from their property onto spaces vacated by the derelict cars removed by the task force — as had happened during cleanup drives in other parts of the island, O'Bryan said. ("We move one there, two or three more show up in the space," he said.)
According to O'Bryan, who is the governor's special assistant for public affairs and initiatives, nearly a thousand abandoned cars have been taken off the streets and lots of St. Thomas since the task force began its efforts in May. And there has been no need to sock it to the pocket of any property owners, he said; the threat alone has been enough to get the job done.
Satisfied at the end of supervising one day's work in the field on Wednesday, he said the effort resulted in visible improvements, fewer places for drug dealers to hide their merchandise, and fewer places for mosquitoes to breed in standing water — at a time when health experts are concerned about the West Nile virus making its way to the territory.
"There were vehicles that had been there since the 1960s," he said.
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