Getting a Whiff of What’s in Store

Ashley Rosenkranz, 11, surveyed the evidence of Orange County’s 3-day-old trash strike Wednesday with an assessor’s eye.

Six bags of garbage and a container of green waste. An empty Coors Light carton. A grease-stained Domino’s Pizza box, plus an assortment of other boxes containing the detritus of suburban life.

All were still stacked outside her Huntington Beach home three days after trash day.

“We’ve already got ants,” Ashley observed sourly.

Across Orange County, some of the estimated 400,000 residential customers affected by the walkout are slowly confronting what happens when the big plastic bins go uncollected.

So far, the impact has been relatively light. But as both sides in the strike seemed to harden their positions Wednesday, the likelihood of a protracted battle--and mounting trash piles--had apartment managers seeking solutions and residents viewing their small plots of suburbia a little differently.

“We’re going to have to put the trash in the backyard,” Staci Rosenkranz, Ashley’s mother, said outside her Rhone Lane home. “It’s pretty yucky. We’re going to have to buy some big Hefty bags and hope that will do it. . . . It’s going to get disgusting.”

In some places, it already has.

Managers of the nearby Huntington Vista Apartments on Warner Avenue, near Goldenwest Street, shut off internal garbage chutes to bins stored on the ground floor of two buildings.

“It’s piling really high and smelling really bad,” manager Heather Ramirez said. “It’s getting really unsanitary.”

Ramirez called competitors of Rainbow Disposal, the complex’s strike-bound trash hauler, but none would empty the bins or set up their own, citing Rainbow’s exclusive contract with the city.

“There’s nothing we can do about it because there’s only one contract and they have a monopoly,” she said.

Residents were asked to limit their garbage, but Ramirez said not many were complying.

“People are still throwing out furniture,” she said. “It’s just getting worse and worse.”

At Casa Monterrey apartments in Huntington Beach, assistant manager Linda Stone spent part of Wednesday handing out large trash bags to residents and asking them to tie the bags tightly and keep them in their apartments or on their patios.

She also was trying to persuade managers of other apartment complexes to share in the cost of renting trucks that staff maintenance workers could use to move trash to the Rainbow Disposal transfer station.

“So far, residents have been great,” she said. “They understand it’s out of our control.”

Erich Bigenho, though, was in control. He already had reserved a rental truck to move some furniture Wednesday at his Clearbrook Drive home in Huntington Beach.

Once he was done, he decided to play trash man. Bigenho and his 8-year-old son, Tyler, spent the afternoon loading up his neighbors’ trash bins before heading to the Rainbow transfer station on Nichols Street.

“It was getting to the critical point,” Bigenho said. “In my house, we go through six bags a week. . . . It’s not so bad this week. Next week will be different story.”

Bigenho said some neighbors on the cul de sac asked him to take their trash too.

Other bins he simply grabbed on his own, planning to return them empty later.

“It’s that kind of a block,” Bigenho said as he prepared to join the string of trucks waiting to pass through the picket line outside the transfer station.

“It’s not that big a deal. I just happened to have a truck today.”

In Stanton, Santa Maria Street got a last-minute reprieve.

The neighborhood, which lies just east of the Union Pacific railroad tracks, is evolving from a past of gangs and blight into an enclave of landscaped yards and painted homes.

For most of this week, though, it looked as if the past was catching up to it as garbage cans set curbside Sunday night slowly overflowed with each passing day. By late Wednesday, some teemed with maggots and ants.

“We moved here five months ago because my mama thought the neighborhood was so pretty,” said Jennie Aguilar, 7. “It’s not pretty now.”

Tony Manjibar, a restaurant manager who’s lived on the street for 15 years, said the long rows of black barrels on the street since Sunday night were “a terrible eyesore.”

“People who live on this street have really worked hard to make it a better place for their children,” he said.

“You can’t judge our street by how it looks today. This is terrible.”

But it wasn’t for long.

Just before 4 p.m., a CR&R; truck made a lumbering turn onto the street, where it was greeted by cheers.

Some residents ran into their houses and backyards to retrieve stored trash and jam it into overflowing bins before the truck made it to their houses.

The fear: The truck might be here today, but who could say when it would come back?

“What a relief,” Gina Venegas said. “I was beginning to worry what we were going to do. This neighborhood was starting to stink.”

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Times staff writer Scott Martelle contributed to this report.