Please find below an update just received from the Chief Officer:
"Firstly thank you for your collective support last week in helping communicate the disruption in service and the approach being taken, also for the messages sent/passed on to us thanking crews for braving the weather and conditions and doing what they could.
Ahead of the End of Day report due later this afternoon, I thought it helpful to make clear the current position and to provide some extra information that may help in terms of contact from frustrated residents.
Current position:
As per the messaging/comms throughout last week, we will not be recovering missed streets from last week.
From today we will be focusing on the scheduled collections for this week only. We expect there to be significantly more waste to collect this week and of course next week, due to the impact/knock on effect of the missed collections. We will take all extra waste presented with black or green bins for this and next week providing it is securely bagged.
To assist crews with this “heavy presentation” will be providing an extra loader for each crew where possible, prioritising the fortnightly black bin collections with this extra help. From tomorrow we will also try to crew up extra recovery crews so that we do not fall behind with any misses this week. This is all of course subject to there being enough extra staff and wagons available and comes after a particularly demanding week last week for staff.
There are still pockets of the city where ice remains an issue this morning. However, we plan to return to providing the usual End of Day report today with lists of those streets missed that day, and to attempt to revisit those streets to complete collections with 2 days where that is possible.
Last week:
Last week was one of the most challenging for many years. In fact some of the more long standing crew members said it was the worst they had experienced. The snow that fell throughout the night on early Sunday was as forecast, and the decision to postpone the collections due that Sunday to the next Sunday proved to be the right one. Unfortunately for the remainder of the week the snow remained on the ground, freezing into ruts and being added to by ice/black ice. As with all workplaces, our staff too were affected and not everyone could make it to work, for example for care reasons. Despite this, we managed to get enough staff in each day to crew up all the wagons. However, the persistent treacherous conditions meant that many collections simply could not be safely made; both in terms of moving bins to be emptied and driving a 26 tonne wagon in a domestic street on compacted snow and ice (a little different to Amazon and grocery delivery vans). As well as the physical challenges faced by staff having to pull several hundred bins and several tonnes of waste each every day over rutted snow and ice, they had to work outside in bitterly cold, sub-zero conditions every day.
Our public comms and daily end of day updates to Councillors made clear the level of service possible and that it would not be possible to recover any bins remaining uncollected after Sunday 12th. As well as the daily ward member email, we posted several social media updates repeating this message, and included info in the corporate/council public cold weather updates, on council website pages and coverage by local press.
To help demonstrate why further recoveries of the backlog are not possible this week and the need to focus on ensuring the extra waste from scheduled collections is collected successfully, as well as to show what was achieved last week by staff, the amount of waste collected each day last week is in the attached table.
I hope this is helpful in explaining the scale of challenge and position going forward.
Regards,
Chief Officer
Environmental Services
Communities, Housing and Environment Directorate"
