Better safe than sanitary!
The NYPD won’t allow garbage cans near the 9/11 memorial because it fears terrorists could drop bombs in them — a decision that is rankling downtown residents who want more bins to hold tourists’ trash.
Locals say garbage has been piling up on their doorsteps since last year, when cops ordered the removal of bins bordering the monument at Greenwich, Albany, Washington and West streets.
“It’s not like we have no garbage cans at all,” said Pat Moore, a longtime Cedar Street resident and community-board member. “If someone wanted to drop a package or a bomb, they could use one of the existing cans. It doesn’t make sense.”
John Gomes, who lives on Greenwich Street, said he watches in horror as visitors chuck wrappers and bottles into the street or on top of black garbage bags put out for the following morning.
“There’s nowhere else to put it. Where does trash go?” he wondered, adding that he walks several blocks just to find a can. “It’s trash on top of trash.”
He said that if his neighborhood can’t have normal garbage cans, the city should invest in terrorproof bins.
London put out expensive, bomb-resistant containers for the Olympics and Chicago requested proposals for high-tech terror-proof containers earlier this year. The Port Authority bus terminal uses transparent pails, which in theory allows authorities to spot suspicious packages inside.
“There’s so much security, cameras with facial recognition, there’s police standing everywhere I go — yet we can’t find a way to put trash cans on the corner,” Gomes said. “I refuse to believe it.”
But the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau says any kind of barrel brings too much risk.
The NYPD asked the Downtown Alliance, the area business-improvement district, to remove at least six cans when the memorial opened last September.
Bombs are easily concealed when they’re mixed in with garbage, and terror-proof cans would be too massive and expensive for the already-clogged site, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Other smaller, supposedly bomb-resistant, cans would become shrapnel.
“It’s a question of improved security by keeping a relatively small area free of trash and sweeping trash from streets as opposed to emptying trash cans,” said Browne.