Illegal dumping in East Oakland neighborhood reaches unseen levels; "It's just sad to look at"
The amount of illegal dumping on an Oakland residential street has reached a level not previously seen and neighbors say the city is ignoring to their demands to correct the problem.
On Thursday, an entire block of E Street between 91st and 92nd Avenue in East Oakland was covered with trash and debris, blocking cars and people from walking through their neighborhood.
"Just walking through, you see the obvious construction materials and you also see some household items," resident Anselmo Troy said Thursday.
It's a sight you wouldn't expect to see in any residential neighborhood. Troy lives just blocks away and he's been tracking the illegal dumping problem. Three days ago, he found the litter on E Street. He called 311, wrote emails and he says the city assured him this was a priority since a mountain of trash was blocking the road.
"I've been coming out the last three days throughout the day, because I was hoping that I would catch public works actually taking care of this," said Troy. "It hasn't happened. The smell is atrocious and it's actually making me sad because living in Oakland my entire life, I've never witnessed anything like this."
Troy says he's gone through all the proper channels to find solutions but found out there's another way to get the city to take action.
"Once I discovered that they would continue to ignore me, then I got on social media," he said.
His posts have highlighted some of the illegal dumping issues near his East Oakland home. He's giving a voice to some frustrated neighbors.
"What kind of person are you," asked resident Tonia Dumas. "That's the question. What kind of person are you to think that it's OK to just litter our city like this? Our neighborhood."
Dumas and her sister have lived in East Oakland for roughly 50 years. This is the worst they've seen it.
"It's just sad," Dumas said. "It's just sad to look at. This is not how we live and somebody thinks it's OK just to leave it here."
Residents have tried to catch those illegally dumping in their neighborhood. Pedro Alejandre took a picture of a truck filled with garbage. This trash has impacted his family ever since they moved into their home in June.
"I have two kids and I want to take walks and I used to use this when it was clean to come play out here," said Alejandre. "Now it just stinks. It smells bad. I can't even take them to my backyard because all the smell goes over there."
Signs have been put up to try to deter people from treating this street as their own dumping ground. But the residents know they have to find other ways to keep their streets clean.
I live here," said community activist Ken Houston. "I went to school here. I shop here. I live here, my family lives here. This is real. This is heartbreaking. That children have to walk through this and see this and this becomes the norm."
"East Oakland is not a dumping ground and we don't want people to get comfortable with that," added Troy. "But it seems that the city has decided that we'll get to that spot when we get to it. You just keep it away from Rockridge."
The City of Oakland responded to our request for a comment the day after the story aired. It issued a statement saying, "Illegal dumping is a critical issue throughout the City of Oakland. The quantity of illegal dumping removed by Oakland Public Works (OPW) crews has increased significantly in the past five years and the problem continues to grow. OPW crews are on the ground seven days a week clearing illegally dumped materials, with an approach that pairs responding to community-reported sites with pro-active cleaning of routes that experience high levels of dumping."