Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Sue Kerr, of Manchester, North Side, has been reporting illegal dumping for years in a vacant field behind her house on West North Avenue. Click photo for larger image.

Nearly every Pittsburgh neighborhood gets dumped on, but usually not in plain sight. One highly abused lot, however, stretches in full view behind a row of townhouses in Manchester.

It sits in the shadow of Route 65 and has served the dumping needs of contractors and residents for years, even decades. The property, a former staging area for highway construction, belongs to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which has ceased using it.

Most people reach the point of despair with little to show for it. Sue Kerr is not one of them.

The other day, Ms. Kerr witnessed a 43rd Street Concrete Co. truck dumping something into the beleaguered field behind her house. She called 911. An officer responded but did not cite the driver, observing in his report that he "was only using a hose to rinse his truck."

The owner of 43rd Street Concrete, Bob Yeske, said a contractor told the driver he could "go to the end of Page Street" to wash the truck. He declined to name the contractor, saying, "We've been over there on several projects."

"It wasn't like it was a truckful of debris," he said, estimating the load to have been less than five gallons of dirt and gravel residue from scraping down and rinsing the chute of the truck. He said the driver returned later to clean it up.

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It wasn't less than five gallons of dirt and gravel to Ms. Kerr. It was an illegal act of disregard. "I don't care if its five gallons or 5,000 gallons," she said. "This is my neighborhood and my home. They have no right to use my neighborhood" as a dump. The lot is a proving ground of "five-gallon buckets multiplied by 10 or 50 or 100," she said. "I'm sure other dumpers rationalize, too: it was just one sofa, it was just one box of old dishes, it was just one empty antifreeze container."

Since she moved to the neighborhood last year, she has been reporting dumping incidents consistently to the police, to PennDOT, her city council representative, her state senator and anyone else who should listen.

"We don't need the mayor to take a walk here," said Ms. Kerr, referring to Mayor Bob O'Connor's recent walking tours of neighborhoods. "We need the city to issue citations."

That depends on timing. The trick is catching someone in the act.

"This is the first time we actually caught somebody," she said, though she and her partner, Laura Dunhoff, regularly have found new trash and debris after watching trucks leaving the site. "Right now, I can look out my [back] window and see mounds of junk and debris that have accumulated over the past months. The high grass and weeds create a perfect cover."

She cited an old sofa, tires, bottles, wallboard, paint cans and other home-improvement refuse, as well as, from time to time, syringes and chemicals poisonous to animals.

Ms. Kerr said PennDOT has not returned her calls nor been vigilant enough at preventing abuses of its property. PennDOT did clean its parcel last fall, she said, but it has collected much trash since. The job otherwise falls to volunteers on community clean-ups several times a year.

PennDOT spokesman Jim Struzzi told the Post-Gazette on Thursday, "Obviously, we would be concerned about this. Our district is trying to take a proactive approach to cleaning up litter. We have crews out every day removing literally tons of garbage along the roadsides, so we are going to take this seriously."

Based on Ms. Kerr's recent complaint, the city's Bureau of Building Inspection visited the site. Wayne Bossinger, field operations manager for the bureau, said, "There's overgrowth in the vicinity and scattered debris, a couch in one place. We're going to send a notice to them [PennDOT]," he said. "A majority of that land is PennDOT's, another [parcel] is condemned."

Mr. Bossinger said the bureau will take to court any dumper caught in the act and against whom a citizen is willing to testify.

Meanwhile, Mr. Struzzi at PennDOT confirmed that no one is permitted to dump on the land. He said PennDOT is "looking at" taking legal action against violators and getting the lot cleaned up, possibly restricting access, but ultimately "at getting it off our hands."