No question it's dirty. But our news department wondered if it was also dangerous.
(The video above is not related to the article but we thought it might interest you.)
So we had it tested. What we found shocked the seasoned experts we consulted. And it may mean the street where you live has a lot more in common with an open sewer in a Third World country than you ever imagined.
We followed compactor trucks on three separate days in different parts of Charleston, watching them crush trash and squeeze out smelly trails and pools of liquid on dozens of streets. It quickly became clear the cloudy fluid was pouring out into puddles or being drizzled in looping arcs up one street and down another.
But is it dangerous?
We took samples from a random truck on a random day. Not a scientific study, but a kind of snapshot of the contamination draining onto the streets from city garbage trucks.
"When I first saw the results for the fecal coliform, for the E. coli, I was pretty shocked at the large amount of bacteria found in the leachate," said Anita Ray, Environmental Health Director at the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department. "I am not used to seeing counts that high in things that we would routinely sample, such as outflow from a malfunctioning sewage system."
That's right. Contamination levels in the liquid are so high the only thing to compare it to is untreated sewage.
"Quite obviously," said Ray, "from the lab results that you have pulled just from this one snapshot in time, it indicates there is a pretty high potential for a public health hazard."
The bacteria E. Coli can make you extremely sick, or even kill you. It's also used as an indicator of other dangerous microorganisms. It's so dangerous, levels of E. coli in treated wastewater, for instance, can't be more than a few hundred when it's poured into the Kanawha River (depending on the number of tests). But one leachate sample we took spewing from the back of a garbage truck came back with a reading well over 4,000,000. Another was 16,000,000. And a third pegged the meter. All the lab could determine was that it was above 60,000,000.
That's why Ray calls these puddles and wet trails on your streets a potential public health hazard. Even after it dries, it's picked up on shoes, stroller wheels, anything.
"The worst case scenario, as I've said before," Ray said, "is if you have a child that has a ball or something and runs through the street, the object runs through this stuff and then the child contacts it with their hands, then puts their hand in their mouth or whatever, you've got a real potential for a transfer of that E. coli into the child's system."
How does Ray account for readings that high?
"If I might speculate, which I don't like to do ordinarily," Ray offered, "it could also be because the trucks -- and I have no idea of knowing this -- may not be cleaned out on a daily basis, and that may be showing up as a accumulative residue, if you will, of that bacteria along with the day's collection."
In other words, an unwashed truck could wind up being a big Petri dish, collecting and growing bacteria over time, and then spewing it out onto your street for your kids to play in and your dog to track into the house. And maybe make you very sick.
You can find a copy of our lab results here.
In the second part of this Hometown Investigation, we'll look under Charleston garbage trucks to figure out why so many leave wet trails of dangerous leachate behind, and we'll reveal the $10 fix for the problem.
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