kate hill photography

Here's some pictures of the scalehouse at the Chautauqua County Landfill ... it's where I spend my days. I have the unglamourous job of weighing garbage trucks before they go up the hill to dump their trash. And you know what? I love it!

This is the SCALEHOUSE! As you can see, I have my own bathroom, my own balcony and my own parking space. Inside I have a refrigerator, a microwave, a computer, a stereo, a CB and a county communications radio. It's bright and cheery with windows all around!

This is the view of the scale itself as viewed from my "McDonald's drive-thru" type window. The trucks come up the hill and stop on the scale where their load type is determined and entered into the computer. The weight is automatically entered as is the stored tare weight of each individual truck, trailer and roll-off container. A scale ticket is printed out, the driver signs it and off they go to dump their load. We use the balcony to look in the back of the trucks in case there is a question about the contents.

Here's the view from the drive-thru window looking the other way. The trucks dump their loads on the other side of the big hill.

This is the view from my backdoor, overlooking my private parking space.

And a view down the road towards the dumping area as viewed from the scale itself. The white patches that you see on the side of the hill are flocks of seagulls... not piles of trash.

Yeah, it's stinky at times, dirty and dusty at other times, but the dump employees are great people and so are the garbage truck drivers. The trucks range from pick-up trucks, to regular old garbage trucks, to trucks carrying roll-off containers (the big boxes you see at stores, factories and construction sites) to huge tractor trailers that carry 25 tons of garbage or more! They bring in municipal garbage, construction & demolition debris, industrial waste, refractory sand, and even sewer sludge from the sewer treatment plants (p.u.).

I'd like to take this opportunity to say hi to my truck drivers: Brandon, Chet, John, Todd, Ray, Randy, Bob, Ron, Rob, Dusty, Roy, Charlie, Tony, Scott, Jeff, Terry, Debbie, Roger, Eric, Lee, Sam, Gary, Rod, Shawn, Doug, Dale, Dana, Paul, Tom, Andy, Willie, Jason, Jay, William, Bud, Joe, Harold, Sammy, Dan, Bill, Russ, Lurch, Greg, Donnie, Chip, Keith, Dave, Walt, Kevin, Matthew, David, Chris, Brad, Jim and everyone else from Westfield Disposal, City of Jamestown, Storer's, Jones-Carroll, Battaglia, Onyx, Kingsview, Modern, Compass, Lee's, etc. You're all a pretty good bunch of guys!