SAN ANTONIO – For about two years, one East Side couple says they’ve suffered, not exactly in silence.
The husband and wife, who asked to remain anonymous, say they have filed repeated complaints with multiple City of San Antonio departments in search of a solution to a foul odor plaguing their neighborhood.
Specifically, the issue was a mountain of trash that had accumulated behind one home on Nevada Street near South Palmetto.
“Just dumping, dumping, dumping,” said the woman. “I would call 311. They would say since I couldn’t see it from the street that there was nothing they could do.”
This week, though, everyone was able to see the problem.
The neighbors say the family who lived in the home recently moved out.
Someone then began taking the trash from the backyard and dumping it on the sidewalk in front of the home.
“There’s several mattresses. There’s clothes. There’s shoes. There’s ice chests. You name it,” the neighbor said.
The massive pile of trash, she says, also began attracting everything from human treasure-hunters to animal inhabitants.
“There’s animals that live underneath the property,” the neighbor said. “I’ve seen them going in and out. I’ve seen raccoons, possums. There is a family of cats. They just had babies.”
On top of everything, she says, the trash created an odor that spread throughout the area.
That appeared to be due, in part, to what the neighbor said was human waste that was dumped by the bucketload into the backyard.
“The smell, and, like, it just hits you in the face,” she said.
KSAT 12 News placed a call to a woman, listed as an owner of the messy property.
The woman said she planned to leave the pile of trash on the sidewalk until the city’s next scheduled bulky pickup day on Sept. 23.
The city, however, has rules against including household trash among the bulky items.
There is also a limit to the size of the pile that can be left for pickup.
The mountain of trash outside the Nevada Street home appeared to exceed that limit.
A spokeswoman for the city’s Development Services Department said the home had been visited recently by investigators with Code Enforcement.
She said generally speaking, though, they are not allowed to enter private property without permission and cannot issue violations for items that are not visible from the street, such as those in a backyard.
The spokeswoman did say that the city planned to address the trash pile now that it is on the public sidewalk.
Within hours of that email exchange with the city, a contractor had cleaned up the trash pile.
A city spokeswoman said the property owner would be billed for the costs.
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