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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Along with the usual highway litter, bottles of urine are routinely discarded at the truckers' brake test area at Parleys Summit on Interstate 80.
"That's not the worst of it," said Darrell Roberts, a Utah Department of Transportation maintenance supervisor in Parleys Canyon. "You find zip-type bags with feces in them."
"It's as disgusting as I've seen it," said Mark Kaila, a Salt Lake City watershed officer who patrols the canyon. "Going down into Salt Lake City, this is the first thing tourists see."
The Utah Department of Transportation considers the material hazardous waste, said spokesman Nile Easton.
UDOT crews don special clothing and gloves and use tongs to remove the containers of human waste.
UDOT spends $24,000 a year bagging litter between the summit and the mouth of Parleys.
The two-lane brake test area is mostly for 18-wheelers, though other vehicles occasionally pull in. There are no facilities or services at the site.
UDOT tried a trash bin in the area but "that invited mattresses and stuff like that," Roberts said. The department set trash barrels out instead, but those were often buried in a mountain of garbage.
Idaho truck driver Dave Greer said, "This is supposedly a beautiful area, but this is just a mess."
Greer figures truck drivers are responsible for 90 percent of the trash, particularly the waste-filled containers. He said he has seen the same thing in other states.
Drivers commonly relieve themselves in plastic bottles and jugs while sitting in the cab, then throw the containers out the window, he said.
"We certainly don't condone this at all," said David Creer, executive director of the Utah Trucking Association. "It's absolutely wrong. But there is another side to the story. These guys get a little bit desperate at times."
Creer said truck drivers, who move 80 percent of the nation's freight, have few places to take bathroom breaks because public rest areas are being closed down and the ones that remain have little parking space.
"They shouldn't do it, but the infrastructure is bad in Utah and throughout the United States," he said.
Furthermore, drivers are under new federal guidelines that require them to take rests but not leave the cab, Creer said. The mandatory break might not come in the most opportune location. "These guys don't have a lot of choices sometimes," Creer said.
UDOT isn't buying it.
"The bottom line is that it breaks the law," Easton said. "We certainly don't excuse it."
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
