If you walked by 17th and Valencia streets on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.
This was not the action of a garbage vigilante with an axe to grind, according to Sgt. Murray Daggs, who was directing traffic away from the smelly heap. It was, instead, the result of a fire inside a garbage truck and some poor timing.
At 10:57 a.m., a Recology truck outside the police station was seen with smoke pouring from its trash compartment. Daggs said that the cause of the fire was currently unknown, but could be due to crushed lithium batteries.
“It was smoking inside, and they had to dump the trash,” said Daggs. The truck disgorged its garbage in order to quell the fire. The Fire Department was soon on the scene and quickly subdued the smoldering garbage, according to Daggs. There were no injuries.
As of 12:30 p.m., a team of Public Works staff were cleaning up the spill.
What a pigsty.
Lithium battery fire, almost certainly.
Kind of gratifying to see a big pile of smoking garbage in front of that hideous police station, I gotta say.