This week as the drizzle of a cloudy spring day came down and the morning commute of freeway traffic roared by, Multnomah County inmates worked to clean up the area known as Sullivan's Gulch.
Stretching from the under the Steel Bridge along the railroad tracks to Northeast 28th Avenue, the gulch was once a forest of fir trees filled with wildlife and a stream running toward the Willamette River. Now the gulch is better known for the stretches of Interstate-84, Union Pacific Railroad, and MAX lines that take commuters, travelers, and goods towards the same river.
Cleaning up this area involves the coordination of Metro, the Union Pacific Railroad, and the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office. Although trash can usually be spotted in the area all year long, a big clean up is only needed every couple of years.
Tiffany Gates, a Metro solid waste planner, initiates the big cleanups. The first step is to contact Union Pacific to find a time when no trains are scheduled to come through the area.
"We don't clean it up every year, this is the third cleanup since 2007," said Gates. "When it starts to look bad, we coordinate to get it cleaned up."
The cleanup does make a difference in the appearance of the area but not all of the trash can be hauled away.
"There are parts of the gulch that you can only reach by rappelling down from the neighborhood streets," said Gates. "The trash in those areas we have to leave. One year we had a search and rescue training class come and practice rappelling. They would throw the trash down to where the crew could pick it up, but they didn't want to come back after that."
This time around, the cleanup crew, consisting of six men from the Multnomah County Jail, picked up everything from bags of fast food garbage to tires and shopping carts. The men were watched over by two Sheriff's Officers.
The gulch accumulates trash as an illegal dumpsite and a popular spot for transients. The inmates cleaned up multiple abandoned campsites as they worked along.
The men are a part of the Regional Illegal Dumping Patrol, which goes out to areas all over the Metro service district.
"We've been using inmate crews to clean up dumpsites throughout the region since 1993," Gates said. "Metro pays each inmate one dollar a day and we pay the salary of the supervising officer while they are on patrol."
On a normal day there are two crews out in the field at the same time in different locations. Metro pays for the crews to operate five days a week, all year long. In 2013, the patrols cleaned up 1,922 dumpsites, bringing in a total of 176 tons of waste.
Spots on the Metro patrols are sought after positions for both the inmates and the officers. The inmates are all low-risk, non-violent offenders, and in order to be placed on a crew they have to have a good record of behavior in jail. All of the inmates are serving sentences of less than six months.
The demeanor of the crew was no different than any other service group – the inmates joked around while they worked and even playfully threw trash at each other when the officers weren't looking. The group worked efficiently and with little instruction. At each point in the gulch where trash had accumulated, the trucks would stop and the inmates would hop out and begin working right away.
The crew knew what was expected of them and worked quickly as a team. Once the area looked empty of trash they would all jump back in the trucks and head off to the next location.
The supervising officers sometimes even join the inmates in the cleanup. Officer Jeff Williams Sr. told a story about when his patrol was called to a site to pick up over 80 abandoned tires and they were all filled with rainwater. He described how he and two inmates picked up the tires and got water all over themselves as they worked together to throw them into the truck.
"By the end we had a pretty good system worked out," Williams said to finish the story.
At one point during the Sullivan's Gulch cleanup, Williams stopped the caravan of trucks in front of an abandoned building. He got out of the truck by himself and climbed over a retaining wall. He then started picking up discarded spray paint cans; he had noticed fresh graffiti on the building and wanted to investigate further. The crew came out and helped him, finding more trash in addition to the spray paint cans. After this little pit stop, the crew got back to work and made it all the way to Northeast 28th before lunch.
As the trucks drove away from the railroad and freeway to the streets that make up the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood, the trailer they had filled bounced along in the swelling rain. The crew was off to clean what they could reach from the top of the hill, another successful day beautifying our region almost complete.