'It's a dead animal.' Disturbing illegal dumping plagues one Oakland neighborhood
OAKLAND -- KPIX recently reported on one Oakland neighborhood's battle against a swath of abandoned vehicles. Now, another part of the city is struggling with a different kind of illegal dumping.
"Oh yeah, sure. This is a place where people... it's just a forgotten part of the city," said Oakland business owner John Lewis.
Out in Oakland's 100s, Lewis is not alone with complaints about abandoned cars and trash. But his block also sees a lot of something else.
"It's something dead. It's a dead animal. A dead animal in a bag. It's been decomposing here for a week. Oh yeah, we see it all the time," Lewis said.
Resolving situations like this has also become an ongoing challenge. The city crews that come by will take the other trash, but not this.
"They took all of the inorganic waste from here, but they left the carcasses; the dead animals," Lewis explained.
Those are the responsibility of Animal Control, which has left the neighborhood waiting for a few more days.
"It's just on a regular basis. There's always something that gets dumped on the street," Lewis said.
Just a few blocks away, a longtime dumping hotspot could provide some answers on how to at least control the problem.
"Yeah, for me it's an endless battle. I get frustrated and I can imagine the folks who live in the community, the businesses get frustrated," said Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley.
A stretch of Railroad Avenue has become something of a testing for potential solutions to the city's dumping problems.
"And this is a typical situation, with the rundown car there and illegal dumping. I mean, all of this was covered. This whole street was covered from the start all the way down to the finish."
Things were bad. But now, it's something of a work in progress, with only a few abandoned vehicles remaining. Miley says the progress came through recruiting neighbors and issuing plenty of citations.
"Yeah, we got cameras here. And we're looking to pilot a new program with drones, so that we can get an aerial surveillance of legal dumping and see if there's a way of having an even more surgical approach," Miley explained.
The new trees that line the street are supposed to help change the psychology and discourage large scale littering. But turning back the tide of trash would be a lot easier if there was simply less of it to manage.
"We need all the citizens to get mad as hell and just say we're not gonna take this anymore. Just get mad as hell because this is crazy. This should not be happening," Miley implored.
"Well, it's frustrating. But you just live with it as part of doing business in Oakland," said Lewis.
The drone pilot program would not be an enforcement tool. Instead, the drones would fly regular flight patterns along trouble spots in the city, looking for things that may have changed in the last 24 hours. That way, the city would know almost immediately what had been dumped and where, simplifying the process and hopefully shortening response times.