Trash is rotting in the streets of New Orleans. Everyone agrees it’s a labor

Many New Orleans residents have gone weeks without trash pickup since Hurricane Ida pummeled the city at the end of August, and city officials, activists, sanitation workers and even the company contracted to do the work all agree that one of the central problems is a labor shortage.

The problem continues, and bags of rotting trash are still piled up along New Orleans’ curbs, attracting animals and creating health hazards and suffocating smells in the thick Louisiana heat.

Even before Hurricane Ida, there were problems with missed trash pickups.

Metro Service Group, a contractor obligated to service more than 65,000 customers in New Orleans, faces the most trouble addressing the situation. The company blames a nationwide worker shortage during the coronavirus pandemic for the lack of sanitation workers, specifically drivers. The issue, it says, is further compounded by Hurricane Ida’s scattering New Orleans workers outside the city.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell and other leaders agree. Last week in a tweet that led with the phrase “No getting around it: The situation stinks,” she said the city faces a “capacity issue.”

“There was a limited workforce for this sector before the storm, and Ida’s impact only exacerbated the problem,” she wrote, adding that New Orleans is trying to address three to five times the workload with 25 percent of the necessary sanitation workers.

“There’s absolutely no magic wand that’s going to solve this overnight,” she said at a news conference last week. “And if there were one, I would have waved it already.”

No one from Cantrell’s administration attended a Tuesday city council meeting intended to address concerns over the trash situation in the city. The mayor’s office told the council that the would be speaking with federal officials at that time and asked for the meeting to be delayed up to a week.

“There’s lots of people working in the administration and having one person here to answer question doesn’t seem that difficult,” said New Orleans City Council member Joseph Giarrusso.

NBC News reached out to the mayor’s office for comment regarding its absence from the meeting but did not receive a response.

Nevertheless, Cantrell has tapped Ramsey Green, the city’s infrastructure director, to move forward with Operation Mardi Gras. The idea behind the initiative, which officials announced Friday, is for the city to use the same strategies it uses after Mardi Gras parades to clean up the oozing bags of garbage that have sat outside residents’ homes for weeks.

To fuel the effort, the city is pulling workers and equipment from the Department of Public Works; the Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Board; the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans; the Regional Transit Authority; Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport; and other agencies to help pick up trash.

New Orleans has also encouraged residents to deliver their trash to a trash transfer station in the eastern part of the city.

“People are in their homes: Air conditioning works, power is there, and this is the last problem,” said Green, who has also taken to the streets to help pick up trash. “It is a bad problem. I myself was…