Talk about a snow job!
Brownstone Brooklyn is still awash in refuse on Thursday, more than 11 days after the first flakes from the Mega-Blizzard of 2010 began.
Normal trash pickup was supposed to resume this Monday, but it did not in most parts of the borough.
Schermerhorn Street in Downtown was in particularly deep doo-doo on Wednesday, with piles of recyclables transforming the block’s topography into something more Fresh Kills than Brooklyn.
“They should have been here yesterday,” blasted Thomas Tuminello, a State Street resident. “It looks like they didn’t do anything.”
Residents said city workers removed household trash on Monday, but left the recyclables, which also should have been removed that same day.
And that’s a problem, according to Carin Solis, a porter at 96 Schermerhorn St.
“People need to have space to walk,” Solis said.
In Park Slope, things weren’t much better, as blocks that were to have pickups on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, never saw a Sanitation truck.
“Nothing’s been done at all,” said Tom Miskel, and Eighth Street resident.
And despite the cold — which keeps the garbage from getting the full summertime stench — vermin are snacking away with seeming impunity.
And in Red Hook, the cold didn’t even stop the putrid smell of trash along Van Brunt Street, which on Monday stunk like the bottom of a Dumpster.
“The response to the storm was totally inadequate,” said neighborhood activist Lou Sones. “Somewhere, the administration dropped the ball.”
Sanitation workers finally came to neighborhood activist Sones’s block, Conover Street, on Tuesday night.
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said on Monday that trash collection won’t be caught up for another week, and recycling pickups won’t resume until this weekend.
City workers — already under fire for their laggard response to last week’s two-foot snowfall — are now being investigated by federal prosecutors for allegedly sabotaging the clean-up effort to protest budget and staff cuts by Mayor Bloomberg.
And in the end, who pays for that? Other city workers, like a Department of Transportation worker named Michael, who was on a Downtown street trying to repair a meter that was buried under trash and snow.
“It’s not funny,” he said.
