BALTIMORE — The city typically runs 30 trucks a day out of its Eastern Sanitation Yard, serving Northeast and Southeast Baltimore, but not any more.
“The closure of the Eastern Sanitation Yard facility, which is located at 6101 Bowleys Lane, is effective immediately and is expected to last for three weeks,” announced Public Works Acting Director Matthew Garbark.
10 workers at the facility have tested positive for COVID-19, and 20 others have been sent home to self-isolate.
While it’s suspending its recycling collections, the city has brought in crews to decontaminate the yard, including its building and a total of a hundred trucks.
“We’ve cleaned the yard. The yard actually has been decontaminated a number of times,” said Garbark. “We did a decontamination yesterday. We are going to do another decontamination and we want it to sit completely empty and vacant for at least two weeks.”
The yard has been closed as a drop-off site to the public since March, and contact tracing is now underway to try to limit the spread of the virus from the facility.
“What we believe happened is that employees may have come in contact with someone within their work group who had the virus and it spread pretty quickly,” said Garbark.
For the time being, the city encourages residents to drop off their recycling at drop-off centers located on Sisson Street, Reisterstown Road or the Quarantine Road Landfill.
Regular trash collections on the city’s eastside may also be temporarily delayed, but that should be resolved by this Saturday, June 13.
