An Aspen Waste truck caught fire after picking hot embers Thursday morning in the 3100 block of Sutton Boulevard, and the driver dumped the whole load of smelly, burning Maplewood trash out onto the street.
Rachel Garavaglia and her five-year-old son had an view from their front porch. “We looked outside and this guy had flames coming out the top of the trash truck and parked,” she said. “They made us go inside and look through a window. It got really smoky really fast.”
She said the hot pick-up was made south of the railroad tracks.
Garavaglia said first they put the fire out on the top of the truck, but then had to dump all the trash out and rake through it to make sure the fire was completely out. A representative of Aspen Waste said it’s protocol to dump the load when a truck catches fire.
It’s probably a good thing it happened how it did. Garavaglia said the driver was trying to make it north to the Maplewood fire house, but the further he drove the bigger the flames got out the back of the truck, and decided to stop.
The street was closed, pending a clean-up.
So much of that could have been recycled!
If this was Lemay they could just leave it there and go on with their route. What a mess…