EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this story ran in 2015.
It’s the time of year when the huge piles of leaves that line the streets of Concord slowly disappear, almost like magic.
Except that it’s definitely not magic.
Every fall, Concord sends out three or four crews to collect leaves along the city’s 220 miles of maintained streets, a process that takes six weeks or so, depending on the weather. The leaves, which homeowners have moved to the edge of the road, are deposited at five locations throughout Concord, on city-owned land and a few private farms.
Concord uses vacuums contained in large trailers hauled behind six- or 10-wheel trucks. One person drives, inching the truck along at a few miles per hour; one person swings the 16-inch diameter hose, which dangles from the right side of the trailer; and the rest rake leaves into the long piles called windrows, which are accessible to the pipe’s limited reach. The crew, which starts work at 6:30 a.m., switches jobs throughout the day; last year, they gathered 1,273 tons – yes, tons – of leaves.
The vacuum system, unusual if not unique among New Hampshire cities, speeds the process of leaf collection but doesn’t make it effortless. Even with the motorized assist, keeping the hose swinging a few inches off the ground requires a constant bending and moving that takes a toll.
What really takes a toll, however, is where those piles of leaves are placed and what’s in them.
“It can’t be too far from the road, we don’t want to drive onto the lawn,” said Kevin Demers, city highway system supervisor, in a 2015 interview. “Some people love to leave a big pile in front of the home, but that’s problematic for us. If people cooperate, put windrows along the edge of the road, it goes much faster.”
Anything other than leaves in the pile can snarl the collection and mulching system, which grinds up leaves to reduce their volume and thus the number of trips that the truck must make to each deposit site. The inserts placed inside city trucks to handle leaves are not wood chippers, and can’t handle anything much bigger than twigs.
“If we come to a pile full of branches, we’re not going to deal with it. It just takes too much time,” Demers said.
It’s not just branches that crews encounter, he added: “We might get a pumpkin.”
Farms get tons of leaves from the city each year for composting, but the mulch can have a few suprises like tennis balls, not to mention a lot of bottles and cans.
But that’s not the worst, not by a long shot. The worst is vacuumed dog feces, which gets airborne and spreads the smell.
“Dog waste is a problem, with people cleaning out their backyards, raking it all” to the curb, Demers said. “There are some hot spots, that’s all you smell.”
Moisture is another issue. As we all know, wet leaves are much heavier, so a rainy autumn can slow the process enormously. On the other hand, too little rain is also a problem because it creates a dust cloud – to the point that sometimes the city has to wet down leaf piles in advance.
Then there was the 2014 Thanksgiving snowstorm, which fell when many streets still had leaf piles, freezing them to the ground. It slowed collection almost to a halt, much to the vocal dismay of some residents, because the city sometimes had to bring in front-end loaders to scrape up the leaves. The last pick-up that year took place on Christmas Eve.
One location where leaves are composted is the city-owned earth materials storage site at Fort Eddy Road, managed by Gelinas Excavation. There, the leaves are piled into massive mounds, 30 feet tall or more, which are so huge that the process of turning them to aerate the piles and speed decomposition must be done by excavators – not even front-end loaders are up to the task.
These leaf mountains are so big the heat generated by natural decomposition of organic material can become astonishing, generating steam even when the weather is freezing.
Foxes regularly come out of the woods and relax atop the warmth of the mounds, and in the spring turtles lay their eggs in them, despite the fact that decomposing leaves can be, shall we say, aromatic.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, dbrooks@cmonitor.com, or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
