Tumut Garbage
Here we are in yet another regional pocket of NSW, popping by the snowy mountains right down below in some south west territory. On this occasion we are taking a look at the weekly waste collection in the former Tumut Shire, now merged with a previous neighbour LGA to create the current Snowy Valleys Council. Residential collections are performed in-house by the council itself through Snowy Works & Services, using a whopping fleet of two trucks, at the time being a pair of 4x2 Superior Pak Dennis side loaders bought in 2014. One small truck works everyday to collect weekly garbage, whilst the second little truck works almost fulltime on fortnightly recycling collections. Both machines stretch out far along the rural roads to reach a number of small towns, even driving almost 2 hours to arrive at the most outer lying location of Khancoban! I’ll also mention Tumbarumba Shire was the other merged council and Tumut actually carried out the Tumba garbage and recycle service on their behalf each Monday... keeps waste management integration pretty simple when it comes to amalgamations!
I originally came across truck 637 in Adelong on a Friday morning, arriving way too late, only capturing a few photos and a very unsatisfying amount of video. I then managed to slot in an unplanned second visit to the council for the following Thursday, when the heart of Tumut itself was scheduled for kerbside collections, allowing me to produce this fulfilling video of unit 638 picking up the red lidded 120L bins. With luck on my side I also came across a friendly bloke behind the wheel who was more than happy with the attention, so a big thanks to him and I hope he enjoys the action when he finds it. On the downside, the council was in possession of a fresh demo truck when I was there in 2017, being an Isuzu with a Superior Pak body on the back, but unfortunately no capture for me on either visit :( The council was in the process of purchasing fresh equipment, so both of these Dennis trucks might be gone now. I saw that Tumut used to run a couple of neat single axle MacDonald Johnston Ivecos from 2008, also with bull bars to protect the trucks from the spontaneous careless encounters by wildlife.