Residents of Columbus and Starkville need to be a little more patient when it comes to garbage collection.
Due to dangerous driving conditions due to the ongoing wintery weather, collection has been at a standstill. In Columbus, Lowndes County and other areas served by Golden Triangle Waste Services, pickups will resume next week, according to GTWS General Manager Mary Ann Gilliland.
“We’re going to resume service on Monday,” Gilliland told The Dispatch. “There’s just so many roads we can’t get down still. Between the three counties we serve we have to make that decision based as a whole, not just one county or another.”
GTWS trucks ran Monday, but didn’t get completely done with the routes.
“We had to start pulling trucks off the road,” Gilliland said.
Gilliland said trucks will start on Monday “like nothing ever happened” and run the daily routes as planned.
“We don’t have the manpower to run more than we would normally run,” Gilliland said.
In Starkville garbage collection started running again Thursday, Sanitation Director Chris Smiley said.
“We made an attempt to go back out, and we’re running into some roads that are still icy,” Smiley said. “We got a method where we send in a smaller truck but we can still provide the service, and so far that’s going good.”
Smiley said the city wasn’t going back and trying to pick up the routes it missed already.
“We pick up two days a week,” Smiley said. “We pick up Monday/Thursday and Tuesday/Friday, and instead of doing citywide we’re just concentrating on Thursday today and then on Friday.”
Smiley said the city would be back on its regular schedule Monday if there’s no further bad weather.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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