Hawthorne/Jordan "Clean Sweep" Was A Whole Lot Of Garbage! Situations We Discovered While Looking For Old Tires...

Photos By John Hoff 

Systematically going through alleys to find old tires, we found other situations...enough for 13 calls to the 311 system.

However, since that system isn't available on the weekends (too bad, if you ask me) I just sent the list in by email, receiving an acknowledgement on Monday along with all the reference numbers. In the top photo...

You see one of the problems of doing a "Clean Sweep." Often you have to ask yourself, "Did they put that out for garbage, or does it just happen to be sitting there, and we should leave it alone?"

Other situations are more clear. Here, a pile of filth is behind a fence, though right near a garbage collection point. We can't get behind the fence, so that's a 311 call.

Situations turn up in the yards of vacant houses. That pile of black garbage bags is yard waste, but it's in the yard of a vacant house and appears to have been there for a long time. So that's a 311 call to hurry things along. 

As for the last photo, I don't know whether to consider this progress or a setback. Somebody dropping off piles of unwanted phonebooks found the yard of a vacant home, and just dumped the whole pile in the backyard. Somehow, this strikes me as marginally BETTER than putting the phone books on the steps of vacant, boarded up houses, individually.

But it still merits a call to the 311 system.