It may come as a surprise to you that Miami is the cleanest city in the United States.
It came as a surprise to readers of the Forbes.com article where this was reported.
''Miami is the only place where I've seen people urinate on the streets in broad daylight,'' wrote one.
''You must be kidding,'' wrote another.
And then there was Clarence Graves, the Miami resident and Department of Solid Waste employee profiled in this column 2 ½ years ago when he was cleaning up after Hurricane Wilma.
''I'm not surprised,'' he said one recent morning. ``I think we deserve it.''
Graves operates a Lightning Rear Steer truck-mounted crane, and for almost 28 years he has made his living cleaning up garden and lawn refuse, discarded furniture and the like, and stuffing it in heavy-duty Sterling dump trucks.
He eschews household kitchen refuse, commonly known as garbage -- different truck, different job description -- but has cleaned up dead animals concealed in legal trash, in flagrant violation of pickup rules. On one occasion he almost cleaned up a man who was sleeping in a cardboard box. The man screamed; Graves shut off the Rear Steer; disaster was averted.
Less scary but more annoying is the Styrofoam he cleans up daily; it crumbles easily and floats away in the wind. In all his years as a crane operator he has probably taken some 90,000 tons of trash off the street, at the very least.
He and his colleagues who operate the city's 22 trash-picking cranes pick up and dump 300 tons of trash daily; their garbage counterparts, in 45 trucks, haul 500 tons of their own.
More often than not Graves is assisted by Anthony Randle, who sweeps up what the crane bucket does not grab, and Roger Dray and Alfonso Quesada, who drive the dump trucks to haul it all away.
On this morning the crew was in Little Havana. They'd already picked up several old couches, too many palm fronds to count, a knock hockey set and a picket fence, broken into sections.
Randle said he'd never seen a city as clean as Miami. Dray was unavailable for comment, as he was driving his truck to a recycling plant out west. Quesada said that yes, the city was clean, but he had no opinion on whether it was the cleanest in the country, because he'd never been out of Miami.
Moreover, if the Department of Solid Waste suddenly went out of business, the city would be in huge trouble; and if Miami is, in fact, the cleanest city in the country, it's not thanks to the people who live here, conspicuous in their consumption and defiant of the rules of disposal.
''You leave every afternoon and again there is trash in the same place,'' Quesada said. ``I live in the city, too. But I don't put trash out every week for my house: one day a month, or every two months!''
Quesada, who put up two signs in the cab of his truck -- PLEASE LEAVE THE TRUCK CLEAN WHEN YOU FINISH and DO NOT PUT YOUR FEET ON THE DASH PANEL -- had more to say about citizens who perpetrate illegal dumping, or put their trash out days in advance of pickup, but Graves was moving on, his pace relentless.
Coconuts, glass tabletops and bedroom sets vanished from his path and into the back of Quesada's truck. The street behind looked clean -- prize-winningly clean, even -- and when he was full up, Quesada headed off to the county's recycling plant, almost mollified.
If you have a story idea, e-mail nspangler@MiamiHerald.com
