A friend greeted me the other day with, “Hey, did you see the new pile of trash someone dumped off on the road to your house.”
My friend had driven through my neighborhood just the day before and saw a large pile of trash that someone had illegally tossed out into the desert. I hadn’t noticed it because I hadn’t driven down the road during daylight hours.
He described where it was at, and I decided to look on my next trip out and about. Sure enough, just a few hundred feet off the paved road, someone had dumped a refrigerator, several large contractor-type trash bags, a broken TV, and several boxes of household trash.
“Who does this sort of thing?” I thought as I surveyed the mess. Not someone that I want living in Pahrump, I answered to myself.
We have a substantial illegal trash dumping problem here, and it doesn’t seem to be improving even though local groups are working hard and volunteering their time and effort to clean up our neighborhoods and streets. Most of the recent focus on the problem has been on the trash tossed out car windows or blowing out of trucks or trailers. Yes, that is an issue. Take a good look at the sides of Highway 160 from Gamebird to Manse, and you will see trash everywhere along the roadway. The same problem is on the north side of town on the 160 between Basin and Mesquite. To a lesser degree, it’s an issue on the side roads throughout the community also.
So who is responsible for cleaning along State Highway 160? The answer seems to be no one. Cleaning along the Interstate highways is the responsibility of the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT). NDOT maintenance crews focus their efforts on the freeways and highways in Reno and Las Vegas and not the rural roads. Budget constraints limit NDOT on where they can effectively remove roadside trash. To supplement NDOTs limited resources for litter removal, the state has promoted the Adopt-A-Highway program with little success.
Locally, the BOCC has discussed the litter along Highway 160 and encourages motorists to tarp their loads as they head to the local landfill off Mesquite. Good idea, but that doesn’t get rid of the current trash now along the highway. That is going to take a community effort to clean up the roadway. No one else is going to. But what can be done about the people that seem to think the desert is an appropriate place to dump their trash? That is more about changing mindsets than remembering to throw a tarp over a load.
I haven’t noticed very many “no trash dumping” signs in our community. Not on the 160 and not on our local streets. Posting more signs that dumping is illegal and carries an expensive fine might bring more public awareness. At the very least, if there is a sign on the road you are driving on to dump your trash illegally, you wouldn’t be able to use ignorance as an excuse. Posting more “no dumping “signs would cost money that is probably not set aside in our local government budget. Why don’t we create a local version of a countywide Adopt a Road (an Adopt a No Dumping Sign) program and let businesses and individuals pay for the signs?
Unfortunately, people who are too lazy to drive to the free landfill, who don’t care about the people and place they live in, or who don’t respect our desert area, will continue to dump trash wherever they want.
We probably can’t guilt people into not illegally dumping because if they had a conscience and cared in the first place, they wouldn’t leave their trash in the desert. But, if we raise awareness that you can’t do that, maybe, just maybe, we can stop a few people from dumping here illegally.
Tim Burke is a businessman, philanthropist, educator and Pahrump resident. Contact him at timstakenv@gmail.com