Terror in a Trash Truck

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

A couple of days ago I used this space to tell the story of a snowboarding tourist in South Lake Tahoe, California, who spent a night trapped in a ski "gondola" high above a rugged ski slope.  As far as I know there are no ski lifts in Missouri, so unless I decide to take up skiing or snowboarding at the ripe old age of seventy-five, and go on a ski holiday to some other state, that is probably one eventuality about which I no longer have to worry.

Trash trucks, however, are a different matter.  The local trash truck comes by my home at first light every Monday morning and a young man jumps out of the cab, grabs the two or three bags of trash that I had set out by the road, and throws them in the hopper of the truck.  Sometimes, if there is already trash in the hopper, he will compact it while the truck is in front of my place, but if there is still room for more trash, the old truck will bounce on down the road with my bagged trash still unsmashed and riding peacefully along in the hopper.

I know the part of the truck that receives the trash is called the "hopper" because it's the term that was used in several stories about a trash truck that made the news this past week.  

The tale centers on an unnamed woman in Manchester, New Hampshire, who took her trash out last Monday morning, just like I did, only she had to put hers in a dumpster instead of just being able to leave it along the side of the road like we do in the country.   As the woman in New Hampshire was dumping her trash into the dumpster, she somehow managed to fall in.  The trash truck came along before the unlucky lady was able to extricate herself, and it emptied the dumpster into the truck's hopper and began the compaction process.

At some point neighbors heard the woman screaming and the truck operator checked his onboard cameras, one of which was trained on the hopper, and saw his captive.  The local fire department responded to an emergency call and was able to use some of its equipment to free woman from the jaws of death.  It was estimated (by the trash compacted around her) that she had been compacted up to four times prior to her rescue.

The victim, who was reportedly hopping mad at the time of her rescue, is in a local hospital in serious condition.  A fire department official at the scene said it was the only case of this sort that he had ever witnessed.

(Author Stephen King lives in a state that shares a long border with New Hampshire.  Maybe it's time that he started working on a sequel to "Christine."  Mull on it, Stephen!)