TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Cleanup Crews Hit Streets To Do Gasparilla's Dirty Work

ADVERTISEMENT

By NEIL JOHNSON

njohnson@tampatrib.com

Published: February 9, 2009

TAMPA - By the time the sun poked a red eye over the horizon, as if it shared a collective Sunday morning hangover, most of the detritus was cleared.

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 of Pirates and the bacchanal that surrounds it.

Still, flotsam remained like debris at the edges of a flood that has receded. This flood measured as wide as 350,000 humans.

Stacked street barricades leaned against signposts like tipsy tourists. A man walked the median, poking errant beads from tree limbs with a long pole. Others wandered empty bleachers scooping strings of the stuff, scattered in the grass like dead snakes.

Cigar stubs were everywhere. Overused portable toilets lined Tampa's signature street like sentries.

Johnny Moorer and George Manley were just starting on about 10 hours of work, emptying and hauling away the toilets.

United Site Service supplied more than half the plastic stalls strung out along the route.

How do they like pumping up to 50 gallons of deposits from each toilet, then wrestling the empty 75-pound tower onto the lift gate of a truck?

"It's good," Moorer said.

"It's all fresh, so to speak, so it doesn't smell too bad. It's mostly recycled beer," said Manley, who, with his partner, has cleaned up after five or so Gasparillas.

But they also find lots of things that don't belong in there: beer cans, beads, soda bottles, clothes.

It's roughly the same collection of trash that Tampa sanitation workers were gathering up outside in the hours before sunrise.

How much of it would there be?

"That depends on how happy the folks get," solid waste Director Tonja Brickhouse said.

She won't have a full trash tally until later in the week, but last year, 58 tons got hauled away. The year before, it was 45 tons.

That may be a molehill, though, compared with the mountain left for Tampa's crews from the Super Bowl.

Brickhouse estimates the total for the big game Feb. 1, and associated activities, could top 100 tons.

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

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT