A Fleet Of Trash

Sonora, CA — Caltrans’ one-day state cleanup event nets enough garbage in District 10 to fill more than two dozen dump trucks.

District 10 includes Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Mariposa, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Tuolumne counties.  On Thursday, Caltrans’ statewide Litter Removal Day kept crews busy collecting bags of trash picked up by Adopt-a-Highway volunteers.  Caltrans spokesperson Rick Estrada give this breakdown, “Our crew in the Sonora and Groveland area, they picked up 95 bags, out at Long Barn they picked up 42, in Altaville they had 34.  When it was all said and done, the District 10 maintenance crews picked up about 2,000 bags.  It’s tough to visualize, but in essence, they picked up enough material to fill 28 of our large dump trucks.”

Caltrans says the public can help shrink that amount by always carrying a litter bag in your vehicle and making sure items in trucks are tied down securely.  Estrada adds, “Probably the weirdest thing that they picked up was a mixture of 24 signs…some business signs, street signs and others scattered along the roadside.”

In the past five years, Caltrans reports it spent $270 million removing litter from state highways.  It collected 805,767 cubic yards of trash, enough to fill more than 80,000 Caltrans dump trucks.

Here are Caltrans’ trash totals for District 10:

• San Joaquin County: 820 bags, or 117 cubic yards
• Merced County: 455 bags, or 65 cubic yards
• Stanislaus County: 383 bags, or 55 cubic yards
• Sierra foothill counties: 324 bags, or 46 cubic yards