City of Fairmont, other agencies remove 15 tons of garbage from homeless encampment

Apr. 7—FAIRMONT — The white banner with black letters made Thursday's cleanup event near the Mid-City Parking Lot seem routine and low-key.

However, it was anything but that. The "Fairmont Sanitary Sewer Board Stream Clean Up" ended with more than 15 tons of garbage being hauled away in six hours. Refuse ranged from hypodermic needles to bedding, clothes, old tires and even a child playpen.

"It just looked like an open dump. It was literally an open dump," City of Fairmont Code Enforcement Officer Steven Boyce said. "There was a fire down here not too long ago. You can see that tree they're sitting on was actually burnt. There was a fire here where they had built inside a tent and caused a fire down here several months ago."

Boyce said his footwork on the cleanup began in the summer of 2022. First, he went to the site and talked to some of the homeless who were living in the encampment.

"Anytime there is someone living in an unsanitary condition, that's where we're called in — no water, no power, housing that's not housing. We've worked on this for months," Boyce said.

He said one of the homeless was a high school classmate of his he tried to convince to leave the site to no avail.

Boyce's department played a key role in Thursday's cleanup that involved multiple agencies — the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, which supplied the garbage bags and paid the landfill tipping fees, the Law Enforcement Section of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources who was there in a support role, Fairmont Police and Fire departments, Fairmont Public Works and a cadre of volunteers from Fairmont State University.

Altogether, there were 46 people there Thursday helping to prevent the massive amounts of garbage from falling into the Coal Run Hollow stream and, eventually, into the nearby Monongahela River.

The program was funded by the Sanitary Sewer Board's Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems, or MS4 Program, whose goal it is to maintain a clean water supply in America's cities.

"The MS4 Program is more about water quality than quantity, that's why this is a big part of it and public outreach and education where we need to communicate with the public what we're doing and trying to keep things cleaned up," Fairmont Utility Manager John Carson said. "It's about the protection of our streams more so than flooding."

Carson's colleague in the water department echoed his sentiment about water.

"You've got to get stuff cleaned up, if you don't get these sites cleaned up, it goes in the rivers, streams, water and you're just polluting the rivers," Wet Weather Program Manager Mike Bragg said.

Like Boyce, Carson said, coordinating Thursday's clean up was a collaborative effort that took months to pull together. Another aspect that took a while to hammer out was a legal agreement with CSX Corp. that allowed city work crews to clean up the railroad company's property, which was included in the encampment.

"We had to get permission from CSX and they sent their officers down as well earlier this week to start removing people because CSX owns the property so we had to have permission and an agreement with CSX," Carson said.

The last time the site was cleaned up from the ground up was two years ago, Carson said. However, crews did not remove anywhere near the same amount of garbage then as they did in 2021. DNR Law Enforcement Office Randall Kocsis said an illegal dumping site on Center Street just off Locust Avenue in early February 2021 resulted in 10 tons of garbage being removed from one home.

Kocsis repeatedly pointed out Thursday how he was only at Coal Run Hollow in a "support role." However, his job is often riddled with garbage.

"We deal, unfortunately, with garbage and trash, open dumps, people not being able to get rid of their garbage in a lawful manner," Kocsis said. "So, what we had here was the worst of the worst when it comes to open dumps."

Kocsis said garbage is a constant problem that can lower the value of people's property and cause public health problems.

"What you see here...a battle has been won here today, but unfortunately it will resurface again," Kocsis said.

Reach Eric Cravey at 304-367-2523.