What to Do When Bad Weather Conditions Prevent Us from Picking Up Your Garbage

On rare occasions, IROW drivers are not able to safely reach some residential areas due to extremely slippery and hazardous road conditions. If your garbage does not get picked up due to bad weather, you can either leave the garbage out or set it out again the following week. We will get there eventually.

We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during bad weather days. If school is delayed or canceled, odds are we will be late or have some problems getting to you on our regular schedule. 2013 has been an especially bad weather experience so far. The freezing rain, thawing snow and refreezing have left a dangerous ice layer on the hard pack roads. As always, we will do our best to honor our regular pick-up schedules, but be mindful of the delays bad weather can cause.

Why we can’t risk driver safety or towing delays…

Delays waiting for a heavy duty tow truck that can pull our large trucks back onto the roadway can back us up for hours and affect our ability to pick up garbage for the majority of customers.

• Example 1: On 1/29/13 during the freezing rain, despite using extreme caution, one of our trucks slipped off the ice-covered roadway and had to wait five hours for a heavy duty tow truck.
• Example 2: During the extreme weather events the week of 1/28/13, IROW serviced 10,275 households out of 10,400. The only areas not serviced were hilly areas that hadn’t been plowed or sanded.

Problems we face when our trucks slip off the roadway…

• The Marathon County Landfill closes at 4 pm each day. If we do not make the landfill to empty the trucks, we risk truck fires by leaving the garbage in the truck overnight. It’s also against state law to leave garbage in our trucks overnight.
• We cannot send another truck and mix loads of garbage because it will complicate township billing. Some townships have direct deals with the landfill for disposal costs; others do not. Mixing loads creates confusion for all parties..
• Minimum towing charges in the rural area can exceed $250 per tow.

• One truck accident or driver injury is extremely costly. Injury to our people cannot be measured in dollars. It just makes no sense to risk someone’s safety to pick up garbage. From the mechanical side of things, the replacement of a cart tipper is $3500, just for the parts.
• With fuel costing over $4.15 a gallon, it’s not practical to drive back out to an area for 10 or 12 stops that were missed due to poor road conditions. We will collect the garbage the following week.