Talking Trash on the Freeways

Truckers haul stuff all over the world. But sometimes what they haul ends up all over the road instead. And for most of the past 15 years, Vincent Moreno has been there to help clean it up.

As a Caltrans maintenance supervisor, Moreno has scooped up tons of spilled ice cream on the Foothill Freeway, helped corral cattle stampeding on the Golden State and even picked up thousands of dollars in loose change on the Hollywood.

“We get some pretty bizarre situations,” Moreno said with understatement.

Of the thousands of spills that occur each year on state highways, most pass without much notice except, of course, by those harried commuters stuck behind. Yet with so many trucks, odd stuff is bound to spill from time to time.

To wit, the ice cream truck hauling frozen five-gallon drums a few years back. When the trailer jackknifed and spilled its load, a few drivers helped clean up the mess: They stashed the ice cream in their trunks.

“People started jumping out of their cars to retrieve the ice cream,” Moreno said. “I guess their attitude was, ‘We’re stuck here so what else is there to do?’ ”

It happens more often than not, Moreno said. Motorists will hop out and grab anything that seems of even minor value. He has watched people harvesting heads of lettuce off the pavement and rummaging through stacks of shoes in the fast lane.

“People were everywhere, running around looking for their sizes,” he said. “They were picking up boxes, looking at the size and throwing them down. We try to discourage that.”

There is no use crying over spilled milk--unless it’s on the freeway.

“If the milk gets into an estuary or stream, it can suffocate the fish,” said Richard Crawford, one of two Caltrans maintenance superintendents who supervise the cleanup of hazardous spills--everything from milk to hydrochloric acid.

Last year, Crawford and his team responded to 762 hazardous spills around Southern California. Not all were toxic chemicals, though. Anytime a cleanup crew stumbles upon a substance it can not identify, the hazardous materials crew is called in.

By far the most common spill--accounting for 60% of all calls--is of petroleum products such as oil or gasoline. “Most people don’t relate to fuel spills as hazardous materials,” Crawford said.

But if the stuff flows into a gutter or storm drain, it can find its way into streams, the ocean or the drinking water supply. The same goes for almost anything people find in their laundry rooms--from a bottle of bleach to a jug of window cleaner to a box of detergent.

“Hazardous materials are used every day and they are transported all over the place,” Crawford said.

Sometimes it can take days or weeks to clean up a spill. Crews are still cleaning soil contaminated by a July fuel spill along the Antelope Valley Freeway. Other times, even quick cleanups can seem as if they take forever.

“We’ve had loads of fertilizer, and I mean steer manure,” he said. “Or Andy Gump toilets. We’ve had trucks carrying those spill. It’s some pretty bad stuff.”

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Then there is the junk that thousands of drivers dump every day--the uncountable bits of lives that blow out windows or tumble off pickup truck beds or are somehow simply swallowed by the windy roar of the freeway.

Between 1992 and 1993, Caltrans crews across the state picked up 125,000 cubic yards of litter, enough to bury a football field--end zones and all--in 58 feet of junk. Not to mention the 120,000-odd pieces of debris the crews hauled away--everything from old sofas to neatly packed suitcases.

Each year, thousands of volunteers cruise the freeway shoulders in a daylong search for roadside rubbish. What they find scattered among the eucalyptus and the oleanders is tallied into a sort of catalogue, an archeology of modern man. Just consider the categories of detritus found one day this fall:

* Diversions: four new horseshoes, a 10-speed bike, a full bottle of wine, a finger-painting set and a collection of Elvis tapes.

* Passion: 17 packages of condoms, after-shave, empty Budweiser cans, porno magazines, a bridal veil, men’s underwear, a pair of black lace panties, a girdle, Polaroids of nude men, a love letter written on a lunch bag and a home pregnancy test kit.

* Fauna: dead opossum, dead bobcat, dead sea gull, dead poodle, dead deer, dead rattlesnakes, dead raccoons, dead bat, bag of fish heads, dead pheasant in a sack, a live kitten and a green frog in a bag (also alive).

* Threads, etc.: new socks, shoes, wristwatch, gloves and a prison uniform.

* Money: a $1 bill, a $5 bill, a $20 bill, credit cards, 10,000 won (Korean currency), 15,000 pesos, uncashed check for $1,000, a $50 savings bond and a $200 alimony check.

* Lost: school history report on Teddy Roosevelt, department store credit card payment and library books on the Ku Klux Klan.

* Yuck: dirty diapers, used toilet paper, bottle of urine and political flyers.