It’s Fat Tuesday. While the debauchery, bead throwing and revelry of Mardi Gras is renowned, lesser hailed are the workers who clean up New Orleans’ streets after the parties and parades have ended. One website, BestofNewOrleans.com, is giving these workers their due, however, with a great story on those who clean up after Mardi Gras has ended Here are some of the story’s highlights. We thought those of you with CDL trucking jobs might relate.
After the parades end, an army of men and women dressed in safety-orange reflective vests and clutching plastic rakes takes to the streets, neutral grounds and sidewalks to pick up the vestiges of the party.
Within three hours, nearly all of the refuse is cleared away. Except for the beads hanging from tree branches, power lines and traffic poles, the surfeit of garbage disappears — abandoned chairs, couches, food scraps, foam cups, cigarette butts, beer cans, bottles and all the odds and ends synonymous with the city’s Carnival celebration.
However, this cleanup effort isn’t limited to the parade route. Come Fat Tuesday, revelers wreak havoc on their livers as well as the streets. Before noon, the city’s historic core is filled with costumed carousers and an enormous quantity of garbage. Hand Grenades, Hurricanes, and Huge Ass Beers fuel the chaos. The melee carries on until midnight.
This year’s 10-day Carnival season cleanup force is made up of 600 men and women and 114 pieces of equipment, including seven front-end loaders and 30 garbage and dump trucks.
Overall, these often overlooked and underappreciated laborers pick up between 50 to 100 tons of trash. They work late into the evening to erase nearly all signs that a parade passed along the miles-long route.
Trailing behind the last Uptown parade of the evening is a fleet of sanitation vehicles and a large crew of workers. A mighty vehicle called a flusher leads the way, carrying around 3,000 gallons of water and spraying the streets at high pressure from jets attached to the truck’s front bumper (the water helps weigh down the garbage). Behind it is a band of rakers, dozens of men and women on foot using plastic rakes to push trash into the center of the street. Then comes a front-end loader, a tractor more commonly seen on large construction sites, that plows down the line of garbage, consolidates it, scoops it up and drops it into a dump truck that drives behind.
Jarmal Coates is in his first year on the crew and enjoys the work.
“It ain’t like it affects your Mardi Gras spirit,” he said. “I still get to see the parades. And when you’re cleaning up, you still see everybody partying. You still get that vibe, you know?”
In addition, Ronald Jackson is a veteran of Mardi Gras cleanup crews. He worked for the Department of Sanitation for 24 years and cleaned the parade routes just as long. “You see a lot of different things when you come out to the parade,” Jackson said. “Meet a lot of different people, because people come from all over the world for Mardi Gras.”
Jackson clocks in to his regular shift at 6 a.m., but the cleanup can keep him out well past midnight. In years past, the city’s Mardi Gras festivities produced more than 907 tons of trash. The enormous amount of debris produced by “the biggest free party on earth” costs $1.5 million to pick up, the story states.
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