Jeff Cole: Trash in Philly

The news tip was unlike anything we’d ever received.

A visitor to an East Falls cemetery in Philadelphia complained vandals had broken into a crypt on the property exposing human remains inside. The tip detailed how the visitor was outraged by the scene and worried others coming to mourn loved ones would also be startled and offended.

Working as a reporter in the city, I climbed in an unmarked news vehicle with my photographer to take a look. The tip was spot on. The door to a crypt near the cemetery entrance was smashed with stained glass shattered on the floor. Toward the back human remains including a skull were exposed.

The cemetery gates were wide open when we entered, and no one responded to a knock at the office door for us to question. We decided to do what reporters often do in situations like these, find an out-of-the-way spot, sit, and watch. What we saw was a stunning example of illegal dumping of trash, often called short dumping, in a city long plagued by the practice. More on that in a moment.

“Put your ones up,” Mayor Cherelle Parker urges her audience at public gatherings and press conferences. The first term mayor often follows up with, “One Philly a united city,” and quickly pivots to her catchy campaign mantra of making Philadelphia, “safer, cleaner, greener with access to economic opportunity for all.”

It’s the second word “cleaner” in that often-repeated phrase that’s likely to be a heavy lift as it’s been for many a city leader. In public settings, Parker rails at the word Filthadelphia to describe the city she leads. She’s turned to a veteran of city government, Carlton Williams, to lead her war on trash as Philly’s first “Clean and Green Czar.”  Williams, tall and affable with a politician’s grip and grin, mounted an effort to clear every city neighborhood with a Panzer-like attack of hulking city trash trucks, workers armed with blowers followed by water trucks blasting streets with high-pressure  spray. And if graffiti-covered vehicles sit smashed and abandoned, the feared Philadelphia Parking Authority’s tow squad thunders in to haul the offending vehicle away. 

Along with increasing trash pickup to twice weekly in some neighborhoods, Parker has turned to the media to wage her battle. It was a blustery Friday in February of last year when the mayor’s staff called me and my photographer to a Strawberry Mansion neighborhood to record the first of her neighborhood-by-neighborhood assault on trash. Resident Jerry Whitfield, taking in the big sweep, said, “it was about time we get somebody out here on the ground seeing what kind of neighborhood we got, how we live and try to keep up the neighborhood.”  Parker later walked the block pointing out abandoned lots, cracked city sidewalks and troubled storefronts while pledging to return.

Illegal dumping has long plagued Philadelphia. In twenty-five years of reporting here, I’ve done dozens of stories and spoken with many residents disheartened, often livid, at the tires, old furniture, construction debris and foul-smelling trash dumped in their communities often overnight along side streets, dead ends even main roads hit repeatedly. Sometimes we’d pick through the trash looking for an address or an indicator of where it had come from and who did it. Often, the piles were filled with wood, drywall, broken glass, and window frames short-dumped on a city street by work crews cutting corners and ducking disposal fees.

Although not unique to Philadelphia, it’s certainly disheartening to see crumbled fast food containers, cups, candy wrappers even bottles go flying out of the windows of passing cars or watch pedestrians drop trash as they walk. 

Parker and Williams have launched yet another tactic in the fight. Dozens of city workers now have the authority to issue tickets carrying a $5,000 dollar wallop for just one illegally dumped item. The city claims it’s won over $3 million in judgements against dumpers and thousands in cleanup costs.

But there may be yet another way to slow the scourge of illegal dumping in Philadelphia: embarrassment. 

Sitting and watching near the East Falls cemetery, we looked on with amazement as a truck loaded to the top with construction debris, pulled up to the cemetery’s gate, and was met by a woman who came out of the front office. She directed the truck to the back of the cemetery where we scrambled ahead and rolled our video camera as the truck dropped wood, drywall, old toilets, and trash onto a lot at the back of the cemetery close to graves. We finished reporting and broadcast our report which quickly attracted the interest of police. 

Several weeks later, working on a tip, we hustled back to the cemetery to watch city police perform what’s known as a perp-walk, leading a group of cemetery workers in handcuffs to waiting squad cars to be charged for illegal dumping.

Jeff Cole was an investigative, politics and policy reporter at Fox 29 in Philadelphia for 25 years. He is a two-time winner of the Weiss Award for Investigative Reporting, as well as the recipient of a series of Edward R. Murrow Awards and Associated Press Awards and four New England Emmy Awards for his investigative reporting.