Saturday, March 22, 2008

Trash talk continues at Mount Milam in Illinois

Sheets of rain Tuesday afternoon didn't stop the ballet atop Mount Milam.

Dirt-caked garbage trucks - some from St. Louis, some from Franklin County, some from Granite City ÂÂ- still lumbered up pockmarked Bend Road off Illinois Route 203, dumping their loads of wood scraps, cardboard boxes or tin cans into a soup of muddy runoff before the debris was swept away by a yellow bulldozer.

Those who work atop this 160-foot-tall mound of trash, some of it dating to the 1950s, start this routine every morning at 4:30 and work 12 hours a day, no matter the weather. It's dirty, potentiality dangerous work. And the snake of garbage trucks stocked with tons of refuse just keep climbing up that hill.

"They never stop coming," said Bill Raynor, the operations manager who runs the landfill, sitting in his muddy pickup truck near the off-loading area Tuesday afternoon. "Not rain or snow. They just keep coming."

Welcome to the Milam Landfill, a 500-acre, 160-foot-tall behemoth just off Interstate 55-70 in Fairmont City that handles a large chunk of the trash generated in the region, from municipal trash and lawn clippings picked up along curbs to medical waste and construction debris, including some from the old Busch Stadium demolished three years ago.

Read more about the Milam Landfill at: http://stclairjournal.stltoday.com/articles/2008/03/22/news/sj2tn20080320-0320gcj-milam.ii1.txt
or
http://tinyurl.com/2e2lpf

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