TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Cleanup Crews Do Gasparilla's Dirty Work

Tribune photo by NEIL JOHNSON

Johnny Moorer shuffles one of 56 portable toilets United Site Service provided for the Gasparilla parade aboard a truck. Moorer has helped haul away the toilets after the past five parades.

ADVERTISEMENT

By NEIL JOHNSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 8, 2009

TAMPA - By the time the sun poked a red eye over the horizon like it shared Tampa's collective hangover and would rather sleep in, most of the detritus was cleaned from Saturday's parade route.

Three shifts of city crews hit Bayshore Boulevard and its side streets about 9 p.m. Saturday to remove the tons of trash left from the Gasparilla parade and the bacchanal that surrounds it.

By dawn, most of the garbage was gone.

Still, flotsam of litter remained like debris left after the human flood covered the parade route, then receded. Stacked street barricades leaned against signposts like tipsy tourists.

A man walked the median, poking errant beads from tree limbs with a long pole and a few others wandered around empty bleachers scooping up strings of abandoned beads scattered in the grass like dead snakes.

Over-used portable toilets lined both sides of the road like sentries.

And Johnny Moorer and George Manley were just starting on about 10 hours of work emptying and hauling away those oases of the parade as they have for the past five Gasparilla parades.
United Site Service supplied 56 of the portable toilets strung out along the route.

"It's good," Moorer said of the task that involves pumping up to 50 gallons of deposits out of each toilet, then wrestling the empty 75-pound facility on the lift gate of a truck.

The toilets often contain a bizarre mixture from beer cans, beads and soda bottles to clothes and about everything else, said Manley whose job was to pump out the toilets.

"It's all fresh, so to speak, so it doesn't smell too bad. It's mostly recycled beer," he said.
Earlier, city workers removed the 400 recycling containers and other trash cans, though a few cans overflowed on side streets looking like kids chewing with full mouths.

Officials won't have a full trash tally until later in the week, but last year, 58 tons were hauled away. The year before, it was 45 tons. Recyclables made up 4.6 tons of last year's haul.

That may be a molehill compared to the mountain left from the Super Bowl that is still being measured.

Solid waste Director Tonja Brickhouse estimates the total for Super Bowl could top 100 tons.

Editor Dennis Joyce contributed to this report. Neil Johnson can be reached at (813) 259-7731.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT