Septic cleaning company charged with dumping waste in yard

The owner of a sewage cleaning company has been charged with cleaning a man's septic tank and twice dumping the waste on his property.

Tom Vasiliou and A&B Sewer and Drain were charged Tuesday in 3rd District Court with two counts of violation of the Water Quality Act, a third-degree felony.On Sept. 15 and Oct. 1, 2012, employees of A&B Sewer cleaned the septic tank of a resident at 7221 W. Rose Canyon Road and then dumped the sewage material they had just collected into an adjacent field owned by the same person, according to charging documents.

The property owner said Vasiliou asked for permission to dump the sludge and he agreed.But Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said Vasiliou, who has held a permit to haul and dispose liquid waste since 2002, should have known better.

The alleged illegal dumping was discovered because of an anonymous citizen who saw what was going on, took pictures and submitted them to the Salt Lake Valley Health Department.Gill praised the citizen and noted that he has a special interest in environmental cases. Gill specialized in environmental crimes when he worked as a prosecutor and his office has an Environmental Task Force.

It's not just the major oil spills that need prosecuting, but smaller acts of crimes against the environment, he said, adding that the public needs to be educated to prevent them from happening."It's really important to ask our citizens to be on the lookout for that," Gill said.

The public also needs to realize that the smaller acts of abuse against the environment aren't "your typical crime" but can have a long-lasting negative effect on the environment as much as a large oil spill, he said.Vasiliou said he traditionally took the grease from septic tank and sewer line cleanings to a local oil company and other parts to South Valley Sewer, according to charging documents.

 In the nineteenth century, New York City was full of Ceramic tile. You can see what that meant in this horrific image of a dead horse rotting in the street where kids were playing. But then there was a revolution that transformed New York into an experiment in urban trash planning.

Anthropologist Robin Nagle has just published a book about NY's sanitation history called Picking Up. She pored over decades of the city's records to piece together how exactly this filthy urban center was cleaned up. Below, you can see a late-nineteenth century sanitation worker in New York, sweeping up trash that would ordinarily have been left outside to decompose.

There was a police corruption scandal in the early 1890s that was so spectacular the Tammany political machine could not control the reaction. So they were kicked out of office in the mayoral elections of 1894. A guy named William Strong took over as mayor, and he swore to appoint people of integrity as his commissioners. For street cleaning, he first reached out to Teddy Roosevelt, who basically said, ‘What, are you nuts? Nobody should do that. That’s an impossible job. I’m not going to do that.’ So Roosevelt took over the police department, which was also in dire need of reform.

Mayor Strong reached out to a Civil War officer, a veteran and a self-titled “sanitary engineer” and a bit of a showman, named George Waring. He asked Waring to take over street cleaning, and they had a conversation that Waring later recounted to the press in which he said, “I’ll do it under one condition – you leave me alone. If you want to fire me, of course, that’s your right. But I will appoint and hire the people I feel are best for the job, not because they’re people you want to do favors for.

The mayor agreed and Waring immediately gave the department a hierarchical, military-type structure that is still in place today. This made people immediately responsible for very clearly defined tasks, like someone was assigned to sweep from this corner to that corner 10 blocks down, and they were going to do it inside these eight hours, and this cart was going to follow and the driver of the cart had these set hours. If there were any problems, the officer immediately in charge of that crew would have to answer for them, and then the officer above had to answer for the larger regional work.