Try it yourself; just follow the stained trails on the street to the first puddle of what gets squeezed out of your garbage. Then look for the compactor truck.
"We don't purposely go out here and drain the leachate out on the streets, I don't think," asserts Gary Taylor, the Charleston's Public Works Director.
Whether the drainage is intentional may be a matter of definition. Because underneath each compactor truck is a drain, a short piece of pipe that originally comes from the manufacturer fitted with a threaded plug.
"Normally we keep the plugs in them, but some of the trucks don't have them," Taylor said. "They're missing."
Without the plug, when garbage gets compacted, streams of liquid -- chock full of potentially-deadly E. coli bacteria -- get released right out on the street.
"We don't think that we have that much of a problem with it leaking out on the streets," Taylor contends. "We get maybe one to two reports a week on the leachate running out ."
Taylor claims the city always dispatches a water truck when there's a complaint, but many streets show visible evidence of leak trails lasting from one collection day to another -- and beyond.
"Well, the plug could unscrew," offered Gary Grady. He heads up West Virginia Tractor, which supplies garbage trucks to Charleston and cities statewide. "The plug is not exactly flat with the bottom of the hopper, so I assume that it's possible that it could be knocked off or dislodged when traveling some of these extremely steep streets that we have."
"They get knocked out sometimes," Taylor agrees. "Sometimes they're taken out when the truck's brought in for maintenance."
If they can drop out on their own or disappear after maintenance, how many trucks are missing plugs?
"I couldn't really tell you," Taylor said. "We check them regularly."
The garbage trucks are parked just across the street from Taylor's office, so it was easy for a reporter to make an independent check. Out of 17 compactors the city owns, 14 were missing the plugs that would keep leachate, laden with potentially-deadly E. coli, from spilling out on neighborhood streets.
"I'm a citizen of Charleston, and I can't remember seeing leakage from a packer on my street," Taylor argued. "Doesn't mean that it hasn't happened, but I haven't seen it as a problem at all."
"I guess we've never recognized it as a big problem," Taylor said. "So that's why there's never been much attention given to whether the plugs were in or not."
Once alerted to the issue, the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department's is paying attention. After reviewing the independent test results from leachate spewing on Charleston streets, Environmental Health Director Anita Ray called it a "potential public health hazard."
"Even two or three times a year," Ray said bluntly, "that's just way too much E. Coli to be put back out on the ground for people to be able to come in contact with but again you gotta use common sense. We don't live in a Third World country."
But the image of an open sewer running down the middle of the street may not be that far off the mark. It turns out the liquid drizzling from the trucks is essentially unregulated. In the third part of this Hometown Investigation, reaction from lawmakers and regulators.
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