Its almost as if someone heard my request for more information on the trash company:
Vigilance is the watchword for landfill checkers
January 19, 2011|By Jeremy Roebuck, Inquirer Staff Writer
"Jose Garcia stands atop a 145-foot mountain of trash, his gaze locked on the trucks dumping pile after pile of Delaware's waste just yards from his feet."
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"Just two weeks before, one of Garcia's colleagues at Wilmington's Cherry Island Landfill discovered the body of former Pentagon official John P. Wheeler 3d as it tumbled from the back of an arriving truck."
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"But the fact that Wheeler's body somehow made it to this point, at the end of Delaware's solid waste disposal system, underscores a lesson well-known to those who work day-to-day, like Garcia, as landfill spotters: Each new dump truck brings its own surprises."
"There's always trash," said his boss, Tony Casarino. "Keeping an eye on it is steady work."
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Casarino, now a site supervisor with
contractor Greggo & Ferrara, which oversees the compacting operation, got his start in the business as a landfill spotter at 19.
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More than 500 dump trucks pass through the landfill's gates each day, bringing loads from across New Castle County. Each truckful is hauled up the mountain and eventually let loose on a 150-by-80-square-foot patch where Casarino's crews are working that day."
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"Inspectors occasionally find medical waste inadvertently sent from area hospitals or out-of-state mail - a clue that a driver may have picked up his cargo across state lines, a practice prohibited by state law."
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"That Wheeler's body was discovered at all is something of a miracle, Casarino said. On Dec. 31,
a truck hauling waste from somewhere in New Castle County picked up the body and brought it to Cherry Island.
One of Casarino's heavy equipment drivers spotted the corpse moments before driving over it with his massive compacting machine."
Much more about the landfill operations...