Nov. 9, 2002 – If you regularly visit St. John's Susannaberg dump, you might notice that it looks a tad spiffier — if you could use that term to describe a dump.
Ira Wade, St. John's deputy Public Works commissioner, says that's because he's in the midst of a big cleanup. Banished to the Bovoni landfill on St. Thomas are about 500 to 600 old cars that took up lots of room. "And all that loose debris is gone," he said.
Susannaberg technically is a "transfer station" because the garbage taken there ultimately gets hauled to the Bovoni landfill, While the acreage still has plenty more junk cars and piles of debris, Wade's on a mission to get rid of them.
With money from the St. John Capital Improvement Fund, he said, Public Works bought a track hoe to facilitate removing the old vehicles and big pieces of debris. He stressed that the money didn't come out of the regular operating budget that funds the collection and transfer of the island's garbage.
Wade, normally a low-key kind of guy, gets a bit enthusiastic talking about what he hopes to accomplish. He says that he soon expects to be able to separate St. John's garbage into various components.
"We plan to have a bin for white metal," he said, referring to large appliances. And if your old refrigerator happens to be avocado or harvest gold, those popular '70s colors, it still goes into the white metal bin, because it's for enameled items.
There will be other bins for compacted junk cars, for food and for non-metallic construction debris. "We'll expand our oil storage area, too," he said, noting that he has all the basic equipment on hand to respond to an oil spill at the dump.
While the Susannaberg dump currently doesn't accept old tires or batteries, he says the Public Works Department is formulating a plan to deal with them. And he says he already has some of those items piled up at the dump, because his staff removes them from junked cars and picks them up at trash bins, where they are left by people who don't know or don't care that Public Works can't deal with them right now.
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