This has not been a very good few weeks for the Sanitation Department. Alleged blizzard work slowdowns, slow plowing, stuck plows, toppling gravestones, lingering garbage... and yesterday, two workers "crashed their garbage truck into a slow-moving freight train along the Brooklyn waterfront," according to the Daily News. more ›

A tractor trailer filled with waste has finally been removed from a residential street in Jamaica, after sitting there and smelling up the block for over three weeks. Residents told NY1 they had been shuffled between 311, 911 and the local precinct with regards to getting rid of the truck, which had been parked on a street with alternate side parking rules. One resident had previously complained, "It smells like a dead body. It reeks." Another said, "It smells like a very stinky fish." It was worse than that time the raccoon got in the copier! more ›

There are some more details coming out about the truck that hit a woman in a wheelchair on Bleecker and 8th yesterday. The Daily News reports that the victim was 78-year-old off-Broadway actress and playwright Shami Chaikin, who was "riding her motorized wheelchair in a Manhattan bike lane" and was hit by a city garbage truck. more ›

The first day of summer session at SUNY Farmingdale saw a tragic accident where a 19-year-old girl was killed and a fellow student left in critical condition after they were backed over by a garbage truck while on campus. The victim, Kaeli Sarah Kramer of Huntington, was beginning a class she was taking over the summer after just finishing her first year at a college in New Jersey. Kramer had graduated as valedictorian in 2008 form Knox School in St. James. Police are still investigating, but a spokesperson for the truck's company said that the alarm that rings while the front-loading truck backs up was working and had gone off—police returned the truck to the company after inspecting it following the accident. The second victim was 21-year-old Aresh Saqib, a third year student in construction management, who is in critical but stable condition with a broken pelvis. The driver of the truck finally stopped after spotting Saqib in the side view mirror on his hands and knees screaming. He did not face any charges and was treated for emotional distress. more ›

Yesterday afternoon, a garbage truck driver was killed when his runaway truck pinned him to another car. The Daily News reports that Thomas Guzzardo had "left the Chambers Papers Fibers truck idling on Lexington Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant as he collected boxes around 1:30p.m." The car started to move and rolled down the street, hitting parked cars. Guzzardo tried to climb back in, but was instead crushed against another car. One person whose car was hit told the Post, "It was horrible. I have a lot of empathy for the guy who died. That takes precedence over any damage to anyone's car." The News also notes that Chambers Papers Fibers "became an anti-mob champion" when it worked with the Manhattan DA's office to sniff out the Mafia from the garbage industry back in the 1990s. more ›

Nothing wrong with helping mend the huge city deficit by putting up ads right on city property, right? Billboards are already filling up the skyline, and advertisements have even begun to wrap themselves around the subway cars...but what if they were on a garbage truck? amNY reports that one estimate shows that "the city could generate up to $10 million to put toward billions in deficits by selling ads on garbage trucks and city vehicles." What surface of the city isn't marketable to a client at this point? Vanessa Gruen of the Municipal Art Society says told the paper that: "It seems to make sense that there would be a saturation point. Once it spills out to residential areas …people object to having it in the neighborhood." She also noted that it's hard to imagine "Chanel or Gucci putting an ad up on a garbage truck." [via Curbed] more ›