Kids play
in a pile of leaves. It’s so common,
it’s a cliché in the funny papers every fall.
So normal that a dad was taking pictures of his daughters playing in
one, without thinking about the fact that they were playing in the street. So obvious that an 18-year old, still a kid
but driving with her brothers, drove through that pile, not thinking about what
might be in it. She felt a bump,
probably thought she ran over a big stick, and drove the few blocks home before
having her brother check for damage.
This happened last week in Forest Grove on October 20th.
Everyone
was careless in this accident: the kids for playing in the street; their father
for letting them; the girl for driving over the leaves; but first and most of
all, the school district for leaving a pile of leaves in the street, an
attractive nuisance that did what attractive nuisances do: attract careless
youngsters into danger.
This is
just one egregious example of the consequences of disconnected public landscape
maintenance. One worker piles up leaves
and expects that a crew will be brought to take them away. But no one is in charge of making sure that
gets done immediately, and it can sit for days or weeks before it gets done,
often after citizen complaints.
Businesses
generally don’t leave basic landscape maintenance jobs like leaf cleanup
half-done even for one day, much less over the weekend. They have to look at it, and they expect
their maintenance people to finish a job before they leave.
Governments
do so routinely. Their properties are spread
over wide areas; their workers are focused on their tasks; and their
contractors are narrowly focused on their contracts. No one is in charge of making sure that landscape
maintenance gets done in a timely, professional manner. Landscape maintenance is an afterthought,
perpetually underfunded or not funded at all.
Community
corrections work crews are used for work like picking up and hauling leaves,
but their time is limited, both per customer and per day, and each government
only gets about a day a week. When it’s time,
they have to go, regardless of how much work they have done or have yet to
do.
Leaves
don’t have to be piled in the street to be dangerous. When they fall on the street and get slick,
rotting in the rain, they are a hazard to walkers. I have slipped on them; so has my daughter,
walking to work in the early mornings.
Drivers skid in them too.
Residential
property owners and residents are the worst for leaving their leaves to rot in
the street. Grants Pass doesn’t yet have
a code forbidding leaving leaves on streets long enough for them to begin to
rot. Do we have to have somebody die
from a fall, or hit by a skidding driver, to pass such a code?
You make some very valid points in your commentary, virtually all of which I have personally experienced any time I lived in an area where deciduous trees drop their leaves every fall.
ReplyDeleteYour criticism is way too broad however, in my opinion.
I lived in the northeast and owned a full service landscape business there for more than 20 years covering the '80s and '90s.
Firstly, unless you own your own dump, in the majority of municipalities you are mandated to place cleaned up leaves in the street for pickup by the town with specific equipment solely for that purpose, and there are many benefits to this practice, both short and long term. However, with an army of landscape companies doing exactly that with the leaves they are removing, there never was, nor could there ever be, any expectation, and certainly any guarantee that these piled up leaves will be removed "immediately" as I believe you suggested. There is simply no way that could ever be practical.
Therefore, examine the several most egregious lapses in judgement, or some would say simple common sense in this tragedy.
The majority of the blame lies squarely with the father, and I am the father of what were once two young daughters who loved to do exactly what these poor girls were doing. The leaves were in the STREET for God's sake. Does this father let his girls play in traffic as well? This is purely a lack of very obvious common sense, find some leaves on the lawn for them to enjoy themselves in
Secondly, you had a very young, inexperienced driver, who apparently thought it would be fun to drive through the leaf pile. This is wrong on several levels, but mostly because of the potential for what sadly did happen to happen. When I taught my girls to drive, this was one of the numerous things that was an automatic no-no. Besides the potential for a tragedy like this to occur, they are very slippery as you point out, not good for the undercarriage of the vehicle, and akin to driving into water that you have no idea the depth of. It's just not smart, nothing good can happen.
so this is not the fault of the municipality, they pickup up a lot of leaves everday, but they cannot be everywhere at once, and leaves are going to sit for days or longer. Either we change the process of how these leaves are disposed of, and remember, we don't want our landfills full of millioms of plastic bags, or we expect that people will utilize common sense regarding this practice, and so many others that we encounter everyday of the year.