Results tagged “sanitation”

Mayor Bloomberg has an unlikely opponent for his plans to build a sanitation garage in SoHo. Lou Reed has now taken his soapbox (previously stationed over at New York magazine) to the people's network: NY1. They report, "The rock star and his musician wife, Laurie Anderson, are among those suing the city over the plan that would build a garage, maintenance facility and salt shed on the corner of Washington and Spring Streets." Reed showed up at the network's studios last night and declared, "Why would anybody in their right mind want to do something so ugly, so irresponsible, so disgusting other than Bloomberg and real estate people, and slither this thing through without anyone having a chance to say about it because no one knew anything about it. You can't keep track of every last thing these thieves do. But having said that, to store that much salt over water, over the apex of two parks is beyond irresponsible and these people ought to be jailed." Fair enough. But one has to wonder if Reed would use his fame power if the facility were further away from his penthouse.

You'll probably want to avoid eating dinner during tomorrow night's episode of Inside Edition, which promises some pretty revolting video of street vendors doing all sorts of unsavory things with their hands while on the job. According to the press release, the show's "Investigative Unit" caught a number of New York food vendors on tape exhibiting some "unsafe food handling practices." These include:
• One food vendor touching his bare feet with his fingers between his toes before going right back to serving customers.
• Another vendor near Times Square, who while wearing gloves picked his nose, handled money, scratched himself and touched raw chicken right before preparing food and serving customers.
• A vendor outside the Museum of Natural History who licked his gloved hand and counted money. Then he left his cart to use a bathroom in the museum and returned to serve customers without washing his hands.

Yum! And that's not all; Inside Edition also tested the temperatures of food from other vendors and many carts serving food in the "temperature danger zone." Lisa Berger, a Food Safety Expert, tells Inside Edition that "food in the danger zone, between 41 and 140, is considered dangerous…Anything in between those two numbers, bacteria will begin to grow." Well, they don't call them dirty water dogs for no reason.

The city has arrested six sanitation workers and suspended over fifty others after busting them for using department trucks to collect and sell scrap metal on the side. The Sun reports that after a worker was seen using his sanitation truck compactor to “break open an air-conditioner, giving him access to a metal part and in the process releasing ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon into the air,” investigators strategically placed CFC-free air-conditioners along collection routes in Queens, with nine employees taking the bait. "These DSNY employees took keeping discarded items on their routes to a whole new level," said the DOI commissioner.