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Something smells in Comstock
Published January 24, 2003
COMSTOCK — “The people of Comstock are law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, and they don’t deserve to live like this.”
This phrase was often repeated by Del Rioan Joe Morris as he surveyed the small mountain of garbage left around one of two garbage-dumping sites in this tiny town about 30 miles west of Del Rio on U.S. Highway 90.
Morris insisted on driving this writer to view “and smell” the Comstock dump on Jan. 14. As we drove westward on Highway 90, Morris, 45, explained that he had lived in Comstock as a boy and had attended second through eighth grade in Comstock schools.
Morris said his father used to run a filling station in Comstock on Highway 90. Morris said he worked as an electrician and as a welder until sidelined by a fall that severely injured his back last year.
On our way to the site, Morris said he has placed several calls to Laura Loftin, the county commissioner in charge of the precinct that includes Comstock, to complain about the trash situation, but he claimed she had never returned those calls. Morris said he then complained to Val Verde County Judge Mike L. Fernandez, who told him Loftin was responsible for work in the precinct.
We arrived under cool gray skies, drove through town and doubled back to the dump site on a dirt road that paralleled the railroad tracks.
Evidence of the trash overflow greeted us well before the dump site became visible: Banners of plastic shopping bags adorned bushes and small trees along the road, while paper trash, broken beer bottles and soda cans piled against the meager roadside fence like drifts of snow.
At the dump site itself — really just a wide, cleared spot between the dirt road and the Union Pacific Railroad tracks — stood five brown metal dumpsters, all of them filled to overflowing.
But the dumpsters were dwarfed by the hills of trash behind them.
All of the following were seen: A cracked and abandoned child’s plastic swimming pool, scraps of wood, cardboard boxes, cans, bottles, styrofoam coolers, soiled disposable diapers, plastic jugs, old mattresses, broken lawn chairs, cracked garden hose, rusted car parts, bent aluminum siding, a toilet seat, Christmas trees, tires, a deflated basketball and tangled masses of barbed wire and wood that were once a fence somewhere.
There is a distinctively metallic, chemical smell that emanated from the dump site: Thinner? Solvent?
Perhaps news of or visit had preceded us. We arrived to find a dump truck and a pick-up, both bearing the county’s Precinct 3 logos, parked at near the dumpsters. Morris spoke with one of the workmen, who said all of the carcasses had been removed in the morning.
Morris said he had visited the dump when it held the dead and rotting bodies of dogs, cats, sheep, goats, deer, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, perhaps even a mountain lion.
“I don’t have to tell you, it smelled something awful,” Morris said.
“These good people of Comstock, Texas have been good American. People don’t deserve to live in squalor, and this is squalor,” he declared.
Morris suggested the county acquire some of the land across the road from the dump site and create a landfill.
“Maybe that rancher could donate the land to the county, since he already owns some of the trash,” said Morris, indicating clusters of trash on the land inside the fence opposite the dump site.
Part of the problem with the dump is that it has become a political hot potato between Loftin and Fernandez. Loftin last year began a push to wean Comstock citizens from using the dump by attempting to institute city-wide private trash collection. While many citizens signed up, Fernandez countered that other residents had complained to him they did not want private collection of their trash. Many, the judge charged, could not afford private trash pickup.
To Morris, however, the problem is clear: “It’s unsanitary. It’s very unsanitary, and it’s unacceptable,” he said.
Equally clear to Morris is the fact that Loftin is responsible for maintaining the dump in a sanitary manner. “Somebody’s not doing their job,” he said. “And she ought to apologize to the people of Val Verde County.”
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