It’s the wee hours of Thursday morning and workers of the Solid Waste Management Corporation (SWMC) are out collecting garbage in the Basseterre area on Cayon Street, West Independence Square Street, the Bay Road and the Ferry Terminal. The route takes them to Ponds Pasture and all the way down to the Airport Road, Needsmust and surrounding environs. It seems like a typical garbage collection routine, right? Well not quite. Collecting garbage in Ponds Pasture is no walk in the park. What should be a routine garbage collection exercise, is like walking a tightrope at a circus. To begin with the roads are extremely narrow and vehicles are parked on both sides of the road in front the gates of homes of the owners. Maneuvering a large garbage truck down those roads while trying to avoid hitting or grazing parked vehicles is no mean feat. Added to that is the low hanging utility lines in some areas and poor street lighting, making it difficult to see at that time of the morning. Truck driver on that shift Romain Belgrove, has been lamenting that owners of these vehicles need to either park in the drains along the sidewalk or onto the curb walls and not on the road. “The roads narrow already and the vehicles are parked out in the road. Nobody wants to park directly in the drain to make your job a little easily or (at least bumping) the curb wall,” Belgrove said.

What aggravates the problem is the fact that the truck has to mount the curb walls to avoid grazing these parked vehicles. But doing this has been damaging the truck tires. “That’s why we keep losing tires because after a while the tyres start showing wires because it keeps rubbing on the concrete all the time and the life of the tyre shorten by almost 50%-60%,” he said.

Mr. Belgrove explained that because of this issue, the tyres’ lifespan is very short, lasting mere months. “From the time we change the tyre and it start rubbing up (on wall) again, maybe a few months you got problems again,” he explained.

But it’s not only thing that is damaged. Take for instance along one of the last roads in the community. On one side is what appears to be a non-functioning Mercedes Benz parked obliquely to a utility pole. To avoid touching the car, Mr. Belgrove has to veer to the side of the utility poles, after circumventing other parked cars on that street. The truck often comes close to grazing the wooden light pole but other trucks (not belonging to the SWMC) have apparently hit the post as is evidenced by the splinters and gashes of the stripped wood. “All he (the owner of the car) is telling me is that the vehicle can’t move. Some kind of part it needs or something like that. But even if the vehicle need a part, he can at least get it moved further down the road, because you can see that the lamppost is stripped and that apparently comes from another big vehicle,”

All this while the truck continues to bunk the curb walls, grazing the side of the tires, which continues to eat away at the fabric of the rubber. Of course, the major issue is if the SWMC trucks were to graze a vehicle and create a dent or scrape, the corporation would be taken to task by the owners. “If one thing happens and you touch one vehicle everybody forgets how good you could drive and everybody wants a new car because it’s Solid Waste they feel like they should get their car replaced,” Belgrove explained.

The SWMC is once again appealing to residents in Ponds Pasture, to cooperate and to park their vehicles more to the sidewalk or risk not have their garbage picked up. “Who have garages, park in your garage. If you don’t have a garage, some of the curb walls ain’t that high so even if you have a car, the car could go up on the curb wall and make it easier so we have a free flow for the truck in the mornings,” he suggested. “I don’t want something to happen before someone (resolves the problem).”