National Park Service employees will be out again today, picking up the last bits of trash left over from the weekend’s Millennium March on Washington for Equality.
The Park Service had crews working all weekend to keep up with the trash generated by the crowds at the march and rally, the first on the Mall for homosexual rights since 1993.
Park Service workers raked trash into heaps and picked up stray pieces of litter with metal-tipped sticks. It was all stuffed into garbage bags.
“Seems like people don’t use Dumpsters these days,” said Sean Kennealy, deputy chief of maintenance for the National Park Service.
“There were trash cans on every block,” he said, but no one seemed to use them.
About two dozen workers and three trash trucks prowled the streets of the District yesterday, picking up wrappers, cans, bottles and other debris left on the Mall. Mr. Kennealy estimated that 4 to 7 tons of trash was collected on the day after the march.
The weekend’s trash tally was higher than during last month’s international banking demonstrations, when an estimated 10,000 protesters spent two days outside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings west of the White House.
Apart from the millennium rally, the biggest cleanup was on New Year’s Day, just hours after the year-2000 celebration ended and the last of the hundreds of thousands of revelers had gone home.
In addition to the tons of trash the crowd left behind, cleanup crews also had to dismantle bleachers, a stage and other structures.
Traditionally, the worst cleanups follow the the Fourth of July festivities and New Year’s Day.
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