Cleanup continues

Christmas trees are coming down. The yard has been raked, leaves left at the curb. Broken tree limbs and other debris from the Dec. 5 ice storm are piled high at the edge of the yard.

It's a lot for Wake Forest Utility Director Mike Barton to contemplate, but fortunately his crews have help. Workers with Littleton Storm and Timber Services, Inc. of Illinois are busy picking up storm debris on town streets, and will do so until Wednesday, Jan. 15.

The debris is dumped at the South White Street water tank site for now and will be hauled to another location at Wait Avenue and Jones Dairy Road for the county to grind into mulch.

As for Christmas trees, Deputy Town Manager Roe O'Donnell said town crews will pick them up separately from other waste. Residents may leave their trees by the curbside or roadside until late January.

Leaf collection and pickup of yard waste (other than debris from the ice storm) will continue on their regular schedules, O'Donnell said.

This flurry of activity on Wake Forest streets means drivers should exercise extra caution and patience, but some have been caught in standstill traffic -- O'Donnell included.

He was traveling on South Main Street the Saturday before Christmas when he found his car stopped in a line of vehicles backed up from Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School to Capital Boulevard -- a distance of about a mile.

After a long wait, he slowly made his way forward to the source of the traffic woes: an N.C. Department of Transportation crew cleaning up roadside debris from the ice storm.

"I asked them what they were doing, and they wanted to know who I was," O'Donnell said. "I told them."

O'Donnell said he called the DOT district office to complain, but got no response because the district engineer is busy, like Barton, coordinating clean-up efforts.

O'Donnell said town crews and Littleton workers were given instructions to allow traffic to flow as smoothly as possible.

"What we asked them to do is cycle the traffic faster," he said. "If you work with big equipment like they do, sometimes you have to block both lanes of traffic, but we asked them to do that as little as possible and to make sure that traffic is able to get through."

If Wake Forest or Littleton crews are delaying traffic excessively, town officials want to know about it, O'Donnell said. Calls should go to him at 554-6121. Complaints about DOT workers should be directed to state offices at 733-3213.