Garbage

The body of an unidentified woman was discovered wrapped in two garbage bags and dumped on the edge of a back road leading to Liberty Dam in northwestern Baltimore County early yesterday afternoon.Sgt. Stephen R. Doarnberger, a county police spokesman, said the woman had suffered a wound on the front of her head, but he would not be more specific.Investigators described the victim as a black woman in her 20s, 5 feet 6 inches tall and 135 pounds. She was fully clothed in a sweat suit. No identification was found on the body.

TANEYTOWN -- Two Fairground Village residents trashed the City Council Monday for not enforcing a garbage ordinance that some city officers did not know existed.Terri Wetzel and Georgia Krug, next door neighbors in the 100 block of Carnival Drive, complained that people put trash out a day or more before pick-up, drawing animals that dig through the garbage. The women said the trash is a health and safety hazard."The smell of the left out garbage even gagged a trash man," Mrs. Krug said. "It doesn't seem like this town is doing anything to stop this."

A 29-year-old garbage collector was killed yesterday when he was hit by a car in the 1400 block of Fairfield Loop Road in Crownsville.The victim, Kevin R. Adams of Odenton, had emptied a trash can into the garbage truck and was retrieving another when he stepped in front of a southbound car that was passing his stopped collection vehicle, Anne Arundel County police said.Adams, who worked for Johnson Family Refuse Inc., died from extensive head injuries, police said.No charges were filed yesterday against the 33-year-old woman who was driving the car.Police said the accident remains under investigation, and charges could be filed after a review by the county state's attorney's office.

Tucson, Ariz.--Of all the ways to figure out what Americans are eating, William Rathje has the most straightforward. He looks in the trash.For the past 19 years, Rathje, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, has sorted through household refuse.By studying trash in Arizona, California and Wisconsin, he has learned to detect evidence of Brussels sprouts consumption by spotting the telltale leftover leaves. He has learned that frozen garbage is less aromatic and therefore easier to study than room-temperature refuse.

A garbage handler died yesterday when he was crushed under the wheels of a trash truck in Severna Park, police said.James Linkins, 25, was riding on the rear step of the truck and fell as it was backing up, police said. The backup buzzer and other safety devices were working, but the truck was taken out of service to repair bad brakes and tires, police said. The truck is owned by Superior Refuse Removal.The state's attorney's office was reviewing the accident.Severna Park man reports robbery near gas stationA Severna Park man told police he was robbed at gunpoint early yesterday at a Glen Burnie gas station.

An Annapolis-based commercial trash hauler wants to set up a garbage transfer station in Halethorpe, and residents of the working-class Baltimore County community don't like it."It's going to stink. . . . It scares . . . me, thinking it's going to be across the street from me," said Allan Bennett, who lives near the 7-acre site owned by Eastern Waste Industries in the 1900 block of Halethorpe Farms Road.Eastern, which has used the site for storing materials, filed for state and county permits last month to turn it into a transfer station.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon's bill to reduce trash pickup to once a week must be cleaned up before it can become law, City Council members and community leaders said at a hearing Tuesday, warning that it could have unintended consequences and prove too restrictive. For example, the bill as written "effectively eliminates" all trash pickup for some renters because their buildings, which could include up to seven townhouses, would be eligible to use only a single 64-gallon trash can, testified Amy Macht, president of Regional Management Inc..

"Mankind is ... a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption." - Georges Bataille (1967) There is something distinctly human about trash. Zoologists and entomologists have found many connections between humans and animal behavior, primate psychology, even the DNA of fruit flies. So far, though, there is no evidence that hordes of bees, colonies of ants or herds of elephants are endangered by their own junk. Only human civilizations pose such a threat to themselves.

The word is out and the anxiety is growing. In neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, neat and messy Baltimoreans are keenly aware that a decades-old, twice-a-week rhythm of their lives is about to be disrupted. Soon the garbage trucks that pick up their trash will clatter down their streets just once a week. Oh, another truck will come a couple of days later, but it will only take recyclables, those mostly non-offending papers, boxes, bottles and cans - not the crab shells, baby diapers, cat litter, moldy bread and bruised spinach you don't want sitting around for the week in between pickups.

"I started praying, 'Lord, get me out of here!'" Sandy Lifsey said. "And I was hollering to my friend Linda to pull me out."The reason city resident Sandy Lifsey, 29, was praying and hollering yesterday was that she fell down a trash incinerator chute while searching for a partial dental plate she had accidentally dropped down the chute while emptying her garbage.Firefighters rescued her about 9:20 a.m. with hardly a scratch.Lifsey lives on the 11th floor of 200 Aisquith St. After she emptied the garbage and saw her upper dental plate fall on top of the garbage, she decided to retrieve it.She said she leaned in, became stuck, then fell headfirst from the 9th floor into the chute, which runs from the basement to the 12th floor.