Dirty Jobs - Part 2
Someone's got to do them
By Elli Morris CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Tony Ward has the dirty job of pushing around other people's garbage at Shoosmith Brothers Landfill.

Almost every job has an annoying or unpleasant side to it, but real "dirty jobs" revolve around filth and grime. The description of the job itself makes the uninitiated squinch up their face and gasp for air. After all, there's nothing pretty about picking up days-old intestinal tracts from the roadway or watching as some family's dinner leftovers leak out from a trash bag that's just arrived at the landfill.

Below are the stories of just a few more of the people who do the dirty work for the rest of us. To read "Dirty Jobs - Part 1," visit www.chesterfieldobserver.com and search the archive for "dirty jobs."

Tony Ward Equipment Operator Shoosmith Brothers Landfill

At some jobs, the unsavory sights are the nastiest part of the day. For Tony Ward, equipment operator at Shoosmith Brothers Landfill, the nonstop flow of discarded couches, mattresses and miles of plastic kitchen garbage bags filled with household waste is the tradeoff for a caged-in cubicle. All day long, Ward takes mounds and mounds of new trash and transforms them into neat, flat areas.

Puppies and kitties aren't so cute after they've been hit by an automobile. It's William Keith's job to clean up what's left.

"I start with a straight grade, I cut [the piles] down, getting more compaction down on it," Ward says casually of his job that few of us could handle.

For the visitor, the sights at a landfill can be a harsh wake-up call to the volume of refuse created by a locality, but for Ward, he's just getting his job done. "There's a little scent, but nothing bad," he confides.

One reason Ward doesn't complain about his job is that he has the right equipment to keep the muck and mire at bay. "Oh yeah, mama, [it's a] very big truck. You know the extremely large monster trucks? Take one of those and turn it completely into metal," Ward says of the machinery he uses to push the loads in place. Safely tucked away in the enclosed cab of the huge machine, where the wind doesn't kick debris on him and the smells don't seem as bad, Ward goes about his job just as he's been doing for 11 years. Thanks to his dad, who suggested he check out a job at the landfill, Ward passes time switching from first gear to second gear compacting trash, instead of starring at the same four walls all day long.

Lonnie McCoy Vice President of Operations Cii Service of Virginia

There are days on the job when Lonnie Mc-Coy is so covered in soot that he looks like he's been dropped down a chimney. He has one of the messiest jobs around when he's been busy repairing old or broken boilers, working on tubes enveloped in soot and a crusty calcium build-up.

Fortunately, McCoy has a secret weapon to keep some of that soot at bay. When he knows a job is going to be an extra dirty one, he gets decked out in a Tyvec suit, made of the same material used to wrap lumber. The suit comes complete with boots and a hood, leaving only his face and hands exposed. "It's completely white, and we see how black we can make it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks bad. We don't try to reuse it again," McCoy jokes.

The fire side of the boiler, where the flame burns, gives McCoy the greatest opportunity to come in contact with the most soot. He has a machine with a brush vacuum that sucks out the soot.

"Hopefully, the soot goes in the vacuum cleaner, or it will all end up on the floor, and you have to clean up the mess," McCoy warns.

He uses plain old soap and water to clean up any spills and wash his hands, but when he's done he says he has to "clean the sink, too. If not, it looks awfully dirty."

Getting rid of the smell, especially out of his clothes, presents another problem. After 30 years at the job, McCoy knows the best thing to do is wear some coveralls or rely on the Tyvec suit so he won't walk around smelling like a boiler even when he's not covered in black soot.

William Keith Crew Member Virginia Department of Transportation

For Virginia Department of Transportation crew member William Keith, dead dogs, cats, possum and deer are part of the "same old, same old" at his job.

"If it got killed Friday, and it's been laying in the hot sun from Friday to Monday, it can be a little unpleasant, especially after lunch," laughs the seasoned employee. After 25 years of scooping up road kill, wading up to his knees in black, smelly water to unstop drainage inlets, and getting covered in ticks picking trash out of tall grass, Keith has developed a stomach of iron to handle anything the roads and byways have to offer.

First-time co-workers, however, require a bit more time to recuperate from some parts of the job. One fellow went along with Keith on a call to remove a 115-pound dead dog that had been hit by a car and was lying in the middle of the median. The owner was standing right by the workers' side as they tried their best to gently ease the woman's beloved pet into the back of the truck. They made it as far as the tailgate when the insides of the dog exploded all over Keith and the poor kid who'd just started the job. The new guy got sick to his stomach, and "it took him 20 minutes to recover, standing on the side of the road, praying for help," Keith recalls. Both of the men had to go home and change their clothes.

The new kid didn't last much longer after that incident. For Keith, it was simply a minor inconvenience, and nothing as bad as the horse that split open one July 12. The animal had been hit the evening before by a semi-truck, the force butchering the horse on impact. Keith had a front-end loader on his truck and another truck with a snowplow to push the animal up into the loader. The goal was to get the horse far enough into the loader so it could be loaded onto the truck, but there were "various pieces that didn't stay connected. It was 99 or 100 [degrees] that morning," Williams recalls of the awful mess. The stench of the day remains vivid for Keith, who says, "once you smell it, you don't forget it. It implants in your brain."