Trash Truck

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.

Emmanuel Grant Mechanical sweeper operator, Baltimore City Salary --$16.16 an hour Age --65 Years on the job --39 How he got started --Grant began working for Baltimore on a trash truck but later switched to driving the mechanical sweeper. Typical day --Grant works from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., covering his entire 12-mile route in two days, sweeping one side on Monday then the second side on Tuesday. On Wednesday he floats, which means he goes wherever he's needed. He repeats his route on Thursday and Friday.

FOR SOME OF US, the time has come to undertake one of the most unpleasant of household chores, taking down the holiday decorations. Unlike demolishing a building, or knocking down a wall, this task offers little opportunity to experience the joy of destruction. Basically taking down holiday decorations is menial duty, about as much fun as putting away tools. The one chance for excitement comes if you haul your spent Christmas tree to a designated recycling spot and observe an angry machine swallow the tree and spit it out as mulch.

Water main break halts service for 16 hoursHomes and businesses on the west side of Taneytown were without water for about 16 hours Thursday and Friday as city crews scrambled to repair a broken water main on East Baltimore Street.The break, about 100 feet from Taneytown Pharmacy, was discovered between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Thursday, said Taneytown Mayor Henry Reindollar Jr.Repair workers finished fixing the break about 12:15 p.m. Friday, he said."It was a nice gusher," said Mayor Reindollar.

For the past 15 years, proud residents of the once-shoddy Barre Circle neighborhood in Pigtown - many of whom bought their houses from the city for a dollar - have held a cleanup day one Saturday a month. At the residents' request, a city official long ago agreed to let a trash truck came by, regular as clockwork, to haul the trash, debris and trimmings away. The three-square-block neighborhood, now lined with impeccably restored red-brick rowhouses, became a model of spotlessness, its green spaces trimmed and tidy, its sidewalks uncluttered.

A city garbage truck sideswiped an East Baltimore rowhouse in a narrow alley yesterday, cracking a brick wall and drawing a team of inspectors to ensure the building's stability before its longtime owners were allowed back inside.Dorothy and Lee Jay were left in suspense for most of the morning, waiting to see if there would be fallout from the accident -- of tumbling bricks when the truck was pulled away from the wall -- and whether all of their two-story home would remain standing.After barricading the alley and bracing the front of the building, which was marred by a 3-foot-long crack and a section of bricks hanging out at an angle, city housing officials said it looked as if the house would survive and the Jays could stay.

In winter, a middle-aged man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of trash removal. One day the great sanitation trucks will arrive, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. But, like the marvelous birds, we wonder if the sanitation trucks will wait until spring for their migration to our little alley of the world. It is now three weeks since the cans have been emptied in my alley. And, unlike the husband of the lieutenant governor of Maryland, who was famously accused of throwing a little weight around to get a snowplow on his block, I have not attempted to gain public service by my own piddly name recognition.

The giant sucking sound you hear is Maryland's garbage heading south -- and north.Hundreds of thousands of tons of trash, once destined for municipal landfills in Baltimore's suburbs, are instead being trucked to one of several new, privately held "mega-landfills" in rural Virginia and Pennsylvania.The emergence of these new disposal sites has cost some counties millions of dollars as commercial haulers who once paid to dump waste at publicly owned landfills now take it elsewhere.But that may not be a bad thing, say solid waste officials in Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties.

Turns out the wheels of government move faster than you might think. Among the 2.5 million speed camera violations issued in the last three years to vehicles in and around Baltimore, thousands were mailed to the same government that issued the tickets. More than 8,000 of the $40 automated speed camera tickets have been issued to vehicles owned by the state, Baltimore City and Baltimore County since 2009, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of citation records. A range of city-owned vehicles have been snapped by the speed cameras in area school zones or highway work zones.

A Mayo man was killed yesterday morning in a traffic accident on Solomons Island Road and Virginia Avenue in Edgewater, county police said.Leonard James Brown, 73, of the 4100 block of Shoreham Beach Road was southbound on Solomons Island Road shortly before 5:30 a.m., police said. He drove his 1990 Mercury Topaz onto the right shoulder of the road and plowed into a garbage truck that had stopped to pick up some trash, police said.The three men in the truck were not injured, police said. The garbage truck is owned by Superior Refuse Inc. in Pasadena, police said.