Dave Ecklar wanted to protest the sanitation situation in New Orleans.
His decision to make the statement by dumping a truckload of garbage at City Hall, however, was deemed “pretty much a complete failure,” by Nola.com.
Cops arrived before he was able to finish unloading smelly bags of trash from his rental truck, according to the outlet. Ecklar, aged 55, was handcuffed and issued a summons for illegal dumping.
Police said he could either clean up the mess or go to jail. So, Ecklar loaded it into a garbage truck. When the 20-year New Orleans resident was finished, he “took a theatrical bow to the police officers in attendance, then headed home,” Nola.com reported.
“There was a big futility factor to what I did,” he recalled in a telephone conversation days later. “It was Sisyphean to move those bags.”
Ecklar, a professional diver who patches underwater oil pipes in the Gulf of Mexico, had been planning the demonstration since mid-September.
At that time, Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced a do-it-yourself trash removal option in lieu of predictable garbage pickups.
By Sept. 19, the Ohio native had rented a panel truck from Home Depot proceeded to fill it with garbage bags from his Holy Cross neighborhood. While official trash bins in the area had been emptied sometime after Hurricane Ida, overflow refuse had been left behind. It was a mess, according to Ecklar.
Clanging a pair of cymbals, he went out Sunday to alert neighbors to the garbage removal opportunity.
“It was like, ‘Bring out your dead, bring out your dead,’” he said. On his way, Ecklar ran into an older woman who warned him to watch out for maggots.
His neighbor, Belinda Moody, tried to talk him out of taking the garbage to City Hall when she saw him picking up bags. She waned him it would only land him in jail or with a fine.
“He said, ‘I’m just a citizen, just picking up the rubbish,'” Moody recalled. When he didn’t take her advice, she tried to get some support for the project. Neither the TV stations she called nor the bus riders who were treated to Ecklar’s cymbals seemed interested.
Eckler’s protest was “a big, clear, loud message that only I saw,” Moody said.
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City Hall security soon noticed Ecklar tossing trash onto the sidewalk around 5:15 p.m. Within minutes a patrolman arrived.
Ecklar said he complained to police about the city’s failures. He argued that he hadn’t actually illegally dumped garbage but merely moved it from Holy Cross to Perdido Street.
Amy Stelly, an urban designer who happened to be passing by, said she thought she was witnessing City Hall benefiting from trash removal while much of the rest of the city waited. She stopped to video the scene.
“There was this poor guy putting trash in the trash truck,’ she said. “I thought he was a city employee. I thought the city was getting their trash picked up.”
As of Friday morning, Ecklar still hadn’t seen a trash truck in his neighborhood.
According to Cantrell, 197 loads of trash across the city through Operation Mardi Gras, a special cleanup effort. During a press conference Thursday, she said the city has entered four new contracts with companies to help speed up trash pickups across and that cleaning up the whole city is a priority.
More information about debris pickup in the city is available here.
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