Old man winter is a slob

LYNN – The good news is that it’s finally melting. The bad news is what that reveals.”Once the snow is gone, you see the kind of carnage that is left behind,” Lynn Public Works Commissioner Andy Hall said Tuesday. He noted a particular stretch of detritus along Western Avenue between Fraser Field and Washington Street. “I drive by there every morning and it makes me ill, it’s just gross.”Walk around a northern city in early spring, and melting snowbanks reveal a trove of data about the previous winter’s activities. Find the most popular late-night bars by comparing the number of cigarette butts left behind on the sidewalk. Piles of dog droppings similarly reveal the canine population’s most popular pit stops. And perhaps you’ll get really lucky (or not) and be able to learn when the snowstorm coincided with trash pickup.But the trash on the street can cause drainage problems, harbor harmful bacteria as well as being unsightly.So the city has started to clean things up.Each weekday night, a street sweeper goes out between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. in the downtown and then another different route through the city, Hall said.The sweeping shift started last weekend and continues until the next winter. Meanwhile, the citywide sweeping program – which is done by a private contractor – has been postponed due to the amount of snow that remains on city streets. Court-ordered community service programs also send crews to help with trash pickup in the city, but that has not yet started for the season, Hall said.Meanwhile, the public works department has plenty of other storm-related damage to tend to: potholes, guardrails and fences that have been damaged by snowbanks pushed by snowplows, sidewalk bricks torn up by shovelers, and more.Hall said the city received $222,000 for such repairs from the Winter Recovery Assistance Program (WRAP) a $30 million state program announced last week by Gov. Charlie Baker.Meanwhile, the cleanup is not just an issue on urban streets.Nahant Safer Waters in Massachusetts Inc. (SWIM) is organizing a cleanup along six of the town’s public beaches on April 11. The event will also include Salem Sound Coastwatch, The Northeastern University Marine Science Center and local town organizations. The Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management’s Coastsweep program will provide materials for the cleanup. SWIM organizer Vi Patek said her group has organized an Adopt a Beach program where designated beach walkers monitor trash that washes up along the Nahant coast. This year has been particularly bad, Patek said.”Just this winter for the first time, I’ve been collecting a lot of birds,” Patek said. “A lot of dead seabirds. They really got clobbered by this weather.”