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Roadkill stinks up local streets
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Posted on Sep 24 2008
The corpses of dead dogs and cats rotting on the side of local roadways are an all too familiar sight and smell for Saipan’s residents but this week a resident is fuming after he says government officials failed to respond to one that stunk up an intersection in Garapan.
At 9:45am Monday, Carl Brachear called the offices of Saipan Mayor Juan Tudela to report that a very large and very dead dog was lying on the side of Beach Road across the street from a local coffee shop.
Hours later, the corpse was still there, even after a road crew had passed through the area as part of a street cleanup, he said. Brachear came to the Saipan Tribune to find out why nobody would dispose of the animal.
“At noon, the dog still hadn’t been removed,” he said. “By then its body had exploded and the smell was wafting into the coffee shop.”
The corpse remained on the street at least until Tuesday night when a Saipan Tribune reporter passed through the area and caught a whiff of it.
In an interview, mayor’s office spokesman Anthony Benevente said the office’s staff have voluntarily cleaned up scores of dead animals from local roadways as a community service, noting the prevalence of roadkill on Saipan’s streets. However, cleaning up the problem is the job of the Department of Public Safety, he said, and the mayor’s office lacks the resources to dispose of every corpse.
“The mayor’s office has just been helping out to deal with these dead animals,” he said. “We’re not really obliged to do it.”
DPS spokeswoman Lei Ogumoro said that to deal with roadkill on Saipan, residents need to contact the department, which will remove it.
“If people see a carcass on the roadway, we would ask that they contact DPS and we will take the necessary action to remove the debris,” she said, adding that roadkill is then given to Department of Public Health staff for disposal. “People are probably not reporting it to us. We remove any debris from the roads or highways.”
