from the philadelphia inquirer

After party, the cleanup By Marc SchogolInquirer Staff Writer
Marcellus Major has worked 12 years for the Department of Streets; his last three years have been in the unit that cleans up after major events - the Mummers Parade, for example. But when Major and his trash-truck crewmates beheld the 135 tons of debris along Benjamin Franklin Parkway, he was stunned: "I've never handled anything this big."
He and roughly 100 other sanitation workers operating about three dozen pieces of equipment worked through sunup after Live 8 to make good on Mayor Street's promise that by yesterday morning, "you'll barely know there was a concert."
The last of the hundreds of thousands of Live 8 concertgoers who jammed the Parkway finally departed Saturday night, leaving municipal workers and event organizers scurrying to get Philadelphia's most recognizable boulevard ready to continue the holiday weekend.
"It's a weekend of celebration, then cleanup; celebration, then cleanup; celebration, then cleanup," mayoral spokesman Joe Grace said. "We're going to meet those responsibilities."
It was Major and his colleagues who literally and figuratively shouldered those responsibilities Saturday night.
With the Parkway closed to traffic, they swept up and hauled away vast amounts of water, soda and beer bottles and cans; food remains; plastic cups and plastic-foam plates and containers; flyers and newspapers; promotional material for bars and clubs and restaurants; and all the other debris left by the crowd and dozens of food and souvenir vendors.
As Major's truck lumbered up and down the Parkway to pick up garbage and dump it into a compactor, there were constant cracking, popping and smashing sounds from all the glass and plastic the truck was running over.
On foot and in every kind of trash vehicle in the Streets Department's arsenal, workers cleaned the inner and outer Parkway drives. The grassy areas alongside Eakins Oval, just across from the big stage, were where the crowd - and garbage - was thickest. Trash even had to be fished out of the fountain.
The crowd had been so large that it took more than an hour after the last note of the concert - which ran about an hour past its scheduled 6 p.m. ending - before the Parkway was clear enough for the trash trucks and eager troops to finally move in.
That and the long process for vendors to strike their tents and pack their wares further slowed the cleanup.
It was a herculean task. But Major, 59, said he took professional and civic pride in doing the dirty work.
"It does impress you. It says, 'Boy, this is a clean city.' "

I wonder if those guys got overtime? more money that could have gone to africa

chuck