Before you piss off the union, clean up your basement
A dispute between a major Brooklyn landlord and 73 locked-out union workers took a filthy turn today when Local 32BJ released this 48-second video showing open sewage pits and other unsanitary working conditions in basement areas below the 59-building Flatbush Gardens complex.
It doesn’t look great, that’s for sure. But, ahem, how sanitary is your basement? If you have a trash compactor, it may be worse than you think.
"When not properly installed, maintained and kept clean, trash chutes in conjunction with compactors often provide the number one optimal environment for urban pests," Gil Bloom, the vice president of Standard Pest Management in Queens, told BrickUnderground in our trash-chute expose last spring.
Bloom's vivid description of what happens after
you drop your trash down the chute:
“With the introduction of compactors, we created a centralized shaft in
which food waste and other offerings accumulates on rough multi-textured walls
that were previously incinerator chimneys—or in newer units, the waste sticks
to connecting points and possible breaches in the compactor chute sleeves.
The raw garbage that then lands at the bottom with varying velocity splashes
back up and then is compacted into plastic bag snakes that are tied and cut.
Frequently, the delicate ooze from this compacting escapes, or waste itself
accumulates beneath the rollers which move the trash bags along.
At this point, the bags—which hopefully are not torn, and are not rodent proof—are stacked in the room for several days till disposal. This process provides the organic and in many instances gelatinous waste which promotes pests as well as attracts them.”
Sounds like a YouTube moment to us.
