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HOULTON — The Phish fans left Limestone two weeks ago. The last of their trash was cleaned up last Thursday.
By the time it was all over, those whose job it was to clean up the mess determined that about 300 tons of trash had been removed from the site.
Among the items that were thrown away were an estimated 50 tents and a couch.
The massive cleanup was a topic of discussion last Friday during a meeting of the Northern Maine Solid Waste Management Committee.
“There’s not much left out there,” said Ken Hensler, director of Tri-Community Landfill in Fort Fairfield, where all of the collected trash was taken. “We did pretty well with it.”
Wayne Boyd of Boyd’s Sanitation in Mars Hill had the contract to remove the trash from the 100-acre site both during and after the concert. He said planning for the massive cleanup began in February when concert promoters first broached the idea to the Loring Development Authority.
In all, Boyd used 60 Dumpsters and roll-off trash containers. He didn’t have enough of his own and subcontracted with other haulers in the region to supplement what he had. On Friday, he said he could have used double that number.
Great Northeast Productions, which promoted the concert, hired four environmental students from the University of New Hampshire to work with Boyd on the planning for the effort.
But, as Boyd confessed, “It was new to them and it was new to me.”
Despite the masses of people, estimated at 70,000, Boyd said trash collection went fairly smoothly. The first day of the event, Saturday, Aug. 16, he said, collections began at about 2:25 a.m. By 9:30 a.m., crews were headed back home. In fact, Boyd said, there was so little garbage that first day that they didn’t even have to go to the landfill.
It was a different story Sunday and Monday.
“You just couldn’t keep them dumped,” he said, recalling that 30-cubic-yard Dumpsters were being filled again in as little as 20 minutes. “They were rounded over and [trash was] on the ground.”
He said crews worked nonstop from 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 17, to 3 a.m. Monday, Aug. 18, before taking any kind of a significant break.
One problem was that planners had underestimated how far down the 2 1/2-mile runway the fans would be camped. As a result, the last trash containers went only two-thirds of the way down the tarmac.
Despite all the trash, Boyd said fans did attempt to clean up where possible. He said concert promoters handed out plastic bags to people as they entered the site, and that helped some.
Still, crews had to use snowplows, front-end loaders and large sweepers to remove trash from the runway area. The grassy sections had to be cleared by hand. Boyd said about 150 people were involved in the cleanup.
While trash was one thing, cleaning out the 700 portable toilets was quite another.
There weren’t enough toilets available in Maine, and the promoters had to go as far west as New York and as far east as St. John, New Brunswick, to get what was needed. Even that wasn’t enough, Boyd said. Some of the outhouses were still being removed last Friday.
In all, close to 12,000 gallons of sewage was pumped from the toilets, along with a few other things, including T-shirts, sneakers and bottles.
Plans initially were made to dispose of the sewage at the Loring treatment facility, but the unexpected items quickly plugged the filter screens.
After that, the pumped waste was taken to the Tri-Community septage-spreading field. Even that proved difficult, Hensler said. Pump-truck operators had to resort to picking through the waste by hand to remove large items so that it could be spread.
After the field rests over the winter, Hensler said, crews will return in the spring to remove by hand anything that shouldn’t be there.
Despite the glitches, which they attributed in part to their own inexperience with such large gatherings, both Boyd and Hensler said they would consider working with Great Northeast again.
“They were a great, great company to work with,” said Hensler.
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