N.Y. Snow Melts, Garbage Mounts
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NEW YORK — The melting of dirty gray mounds of snow Monday exposed two more challenges for weary city workers: a week’s backlog of uncollected garbage and an estimated 20,000 potholes in New York City alone.
“Oh, man. It’s really bad. Wham bam,” said Sankar Kissraj, 31, a United Parcel Service driver stopped at a light in mid-town Manhattan. “There is a huge pothole at 7th and 51st Street. When you go over it, you really notice it.”
The same complaints echoed through the states affected by the Blizzard of ‘96, from Georgia to Maine.
“You have to swerve into the other lane of traffic to get around them. They’re all over the place,” construction worker Chris Gould, 21, said of the potholes in Trenton, N.J.
In New York, 1,200 sanitation trucks, no longer fitted with snowplows, fanned out to collect 51,000 tons of garbage, 8,000 tons of recyclable trash and 100,000 Christmas trees. A hundred road crews were filling the worst potholes with hot asphalt.
One pothole on the Long Island Expressway caused five flat tires, New York Highway Patrol Officer Michael Flannery said.
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