The amount of illegal dumping on an Oakland residential street has reached unprecedented levels and neighbors say the city is ignoring their demands to fix the problem.
On Thursday, an entire block of E Street between 91st and 92nd Avenues in East Oakland was covered in trash and debris, preventing cars and people from walking through their neighborhood.
“Just walking through, you see the obvious building materials and you also see some household items,” resident Anselmo Troy said Thursday.
It is a spectacle that you would not expect in any residential area. Troy lives a few blocks away and he follows the problem of illegal dumping. Three days ago he found the trash on E Street. He called 311, wrote emails and he says the city assured him this was a priority as a mountain of trash was blocking the road.
“I’ve been out all day for the last three days because I was hoping I would catch public works actually taking care of this,” Troy said. “It didn’t happen. The smell is horrible and it actually makes me sad because, living in Oakland all my life, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Troy says he’s gone through all the right channels to find solutions, but he’s discovered there’s another way to get the city to take action.
“Once I found out they kept ignoring me, I started going on social media,” he said.
His posts have highlighted some of the illegal dumping problems near his home in East Oakland. He gives a voice to some frustrated neighbors.
“What kind of person are you,” resident Tonia Dumas asked. ‘That’s the question. What kind of person are you to think it’s okay to pollute our city like this? Our neighborhood.’
Dumas and her sister have lived in East Oakland for about 50 years. This is the worst they’ve ever seen.
“It’s just sad,” Dumas said. “It’s just sad to watch. This is not how we live and someone thinks it’s okay to leave it here.”
Residents have been trying to catch those illegally dumping in their neighborhood. Pedro Alejandre took a photo of a truck full of waste. This waste has affected his family since they moved into their home in June.
“I have two kids and I want to go for walks and I used to use this whenever it was clean to come out here and play,” Alejandre said. ‘Now it just stinks. It stinks. I can’t even take them into my backyard because all the stench goes there.”
Signs have been posted to discourage people from treating this street as their own dumping ground. But residents know they have to find other ways to keep their streets clean.
I live here,” said community activist Ken Houston. ‘I went to school here. I shop here. I live here, my family lives here. This is real. This is heartbreaking. That kids have to walk through this and see this, and this becomes the norm.”
“East Oakland is not a dumping ground and we don’t want people to feel comfortable with that,” Troy added. “But it looks like the city has decided that we will go to that place when we get there. Just keep him away from Rockridge.”
We reached out to the city for comment on this story and to ask how these dumping complaints are being handled. The city had not responded as of Friday morning.
