Her family pays the city for their own dumpster bins to dispose of their own trash rather than leave it on the street to attract vermin or other pests, Ronquillo said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fruits and vegetables spill out of cartons dumped on the corner of Hooper Avenue and Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
(Gary Coronado \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just frustrating because we do everything right, and then you have these other people who ruin the neighborhood for everyone else,\u201d Ronquillo said.<\/p>\n
In a statement, L.A. City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado\u2019s office said she was aware of the \u201congoing dumping at E. 10th St & Naomi Ave and has been working closely\u201d with the Los Angeles Sanitation & Environment Department.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis site was cleared again on Tuesday morning,\u201d Jurado\u2019s office said. \u201cWe will continue to monitor the area and coordinate with LASAN [the sanitation department] on regular clean-ups and long-term solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles Public Works Department, the agency that oversees the sanitation bureau, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. <\/p>\n
Closer to Olympic Boulevard, a group of workers stacked crates of fresh strawberries on the sidewalk and loaded some of them onto a truck. They worry that the people who illegally dump on the street will hurt the reputation of everyone in the produce industry and their livelihood.<\/p>\n
The work is hard, said Horace Sandoval, who has worked in downtown for at least 12 years. Oftentimes, people take for granted that produce is available.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople don\u2019t want to think about where they get their fruit,\u201d Sandoval said in Spanish. \u201cBut this is the truth. Sometimes, it ends up here [in the street], and it\u2019s sad. Because someone picked it and then it\u2019s not eaten, enjoyed. Just thrown down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along Naomi Avenue, several tents and makeshift shelters line the street. Colorful murals and graffiti adorn the walls near the mess of burst-open watermelons and putrid lemons.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tell them to stop, and they just ignore us,\u201d said a man named Chris, who lives on Naomi Avenue in an RV. \u201cWe don\u2019t want that, but they keep on walking by and dump it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A woman named Brenda says the dumping seems to have grown more frequent and the rats bigger.<\/p>\n
(Gary Coronado \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
A woman who said her name was Brenda said she had lived on the street for about four months. Some nights, she peeks outside her tent and sees the trucks unload the goods, and other times she can hear people hauling the produce onto the street by wheelbarrow or hand truck.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not told why they\u2019re bringing all of that. Is it for us because we\u2019re out here?\u201d she said. \u201cI tried to eat some of the fruit once. Grapes, watermelon and some other stuff. But I stopped once I saw the rats gathering around the food. They looked extra large, big rats that are deformed.\u201d<\/p>\n
She thinks that the dumping has grown more frequent in the last month and the types of rats that are showing up on the street are getting bigger.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not fair,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like they mocking us by leaving food.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Under cover of night, trucks have been regularly dumping rotten produce in an industrial neighborhood in downtown Los…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":219648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,67887,119739,9448,46124,53783,2961,224,2444,5337,119738,119737,54638,45427,107669,119740,40031,2452,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-219647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-city-official","11":"tag-crate","12":"tag-fruit","13":"tag-illegal-dumping","14":"tag-l-a-street","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-los-angeles-times","18":"tag-losangeles","19":"tag-miriam-ronquillo","20":"tag-naomi-avenue","21":"tag-other-people","22":"tag-produce","23":"tag-rat","24":"tag-sidewalk","25":"tag-truck","26":"tag-week","27":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115188802125306448","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}