Crews tackle mounds of fest trash

The Cincinnati Post
4.9.2001

By Peggy Kreimer

It took a half million people to mess up the riverfront at Sunday's
Riverfest, but fewer than 100 to clean it up.

In Covington and Newport, the trash collectors started work early
Monday morning, but in Cincinnati, the job started Sunday afternoon
and didn't stop for the next 24 hours.

Fifteen Cincinnati Recreation Commission workers were on duty from 2
p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday, trying to keep pace with the trash-making
crowd, emptying garbage cans, cleaning restrooms and clearing paper
cups and plastic bottles off ledges and out of bushes.

Another crew took over at midnight.

"I've been doing this every year for 10 years," Cincinnati
Recreation Commission truck driver Bryan Davis said as he collected
discarded beer bottles, syrupy paper cups and flattened french fry
trays with a white-rubber-gloved hand.

"The food you have to step in and the urination you smell in corners
and things, that's the worst," he said. "And the food you see being
wasted - boxes of food that the vendors left behind. You know it's
going to be thrown away. That's a shame with all the people who are
hungry today."

Joining his Recreation Commission crew in the pre-dawn moonlight
Monday at Cincinnati's Sawyer Point were workers from the Cincinnati
Sanitation District, driving street sweepers the size of small
locomotives, sucking up everything in their paths.

The cleanup scene on both riverfronts started with a roar of leaf
blowers, as workers blew as much garbage as possible into ankle-deep
corridors of paper, cardboard, Styrofoam and plastic in the middle
of the roadways.

What can't be blown is picked up by hand. In Cincinnati, a crew of
inmates from the Hamilton County Justice Center picked over the
lawns and bushes of Sawyer Point. Inmates from the Campbell County
jail helped do the honors in Newport. City workers handled the job
in Covington, where the party area was much smaller.

"This year is better than past years," said Bill Blevins, service
area coordinator for the Cincinnati Recreation Commission and Monday
morning clean-up leader.Workers pick out the big things that street
sweeper trucks can't suck up - blankets, lawn chairs, sunglasses,
lunch boxes - and blow the rest off the plaza and down the steps of
the Serpentine Wall, where it waits for the sweepers.

In Cincinnati, the most frustrating piece of litter was a cardboard
fan on a stick distributed by organizers trying to unionize Bigg's
grocery workers.

"It lays flat and creates a suction. You can't blow it out of the
way. You have to reach down and pick it up," Blevins said.

In Newport, the big litter ticket was a pink brochure advertising a
"Free Personality Test" through Dianetics. Hundreds of them lay in
soggy mounds.

Joining city crews to clear away the leftovers of the city's biggest
annual party were treasure hunters, can pickers and scavengers of
the non-human variety.

Before dawn Monday, ants swarmed over paper plates to carry off the
remnants of funnel cakes and pizza rinds on the Covington side.

In Newport, a can collector drained soft drink cans and tossed them
in a cardboard refuse container. On the flood walls, a handful of
more discerning treasure hunters waggled their way across the hill,
trolling for coins.