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Barging into a Trashy Saga

A plan to send Long Island garbage south becomes a national joke -- but helps solve a problem

By Shirley Perlman | Staff Writer

It was 1987 and America was awash in trashy news, most notably the sex scandals involving former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and television evangelist Jim Bakker.

But the trash story that eclipsed all others was the saga of Long Island's wandering garbage barge and its futile 6,000-mile search for a home.

Towed by the tugboat Break of Dawn, the ill-fated scow and its outcast cargo sailed into the national consciousness late that winter, the brainchild of Lowell Harrelson, a flamboyant Alabama businessman who thought he could turn trash into treasure by barging it off the Island to cheap dumping sites down south.

Instead of profit, he found a maelstrom of protest and ridicule that drew headlines across the country. As the barge sailed up and down the coast, its travails were chronicled not only on the nightly news, but on the nightly monologue: It provided Johnny Carson more material than Gary Hart's Monkey Business.

The odyssey of the garbage barge was an indignity that perfectly, and inevitably, symbolized the Long Island garbage crisis of the 1980s. What to do with trash had become an issue throughout the country, but on Long Island the problem was especially acute. After the Island's landfills were identified as a major source of groundwater contamination, the state Legislature passed a law in 1983 banning all landfilling by 1990. So what to do with the trash?

In 1987, 80 percent of the area's garbage was dumped in landfills. But with the 1990 deadline fast approaching, politicians scrambled for a solution. Incineration plants tended to be inefficient and also were considered a source of air pollution. Recycling had been unsuccessful. In desperation, some towns were now trucking their trash off the Island, mainly to upstate sites. The price, almost $100 a ton, was at least twice the cost at landfills. But by 1987, this method accounted for the disposal of 13 percent of Long Island's garbage -- more than twice the percentage of trash that was burned in local incinerators.

Into this picture sailed Harrelson and his barge. His plan was to lease the vessels he saw rusting on the Mississippi River, abandoned by the offshore oil industry, and load them with New York trash that could be dumped in farm fields in the South. He traveled to New York and met with Thomas Hroncich, who ran Waste Alternatives Inc., a transfer station in Islip where garbage was loaded on trucks and hauled away. Hroncich contacted Thomas Gesuale, a Dix Hills man who owned a dockside business in Queens, and together they brought in four Long Island carting companies as partners. Each carter put up $50,000, and United Marine Transport Services -- the garbage barge people -- was born. The partners envisioned leasing four barges to haul 10,000 tons a day -- at a profit of $200,000 a day. "He said when he first came here this was better than oil," Gesuale said of Harrelson.

On March 22, the Break of Dawn pulled out of New York with 3,186 tons of baled Islip trash in tow. At the helm was Duffy St. Pierre, a soft-spoken Cajun sea captain from New Orleans, with a crew of three men. Three days later, the barge docked in North Carolina, where Harrelson had verbal agreements with a few farmers to use some of their land for dump sites. And then . . .

"There were these two little old ladies in Morehead City living in a house near the dock where the barge pulled up," Hroncich recalled recently. "They called the mayor's office, and one thing led to another. They really started it."

The mayor called the governor. The governor barred the barge from docking anywhere in the state. The same thing happened in Louisiana (where Harrelson had written agreements to dump the trash in landfills), Texas and Florida. By then, nobody wanted Long Island's garbage, but everyone was talking about it.

Hroncich, now a solid waste manager in Cape May County, N.J., says that things might have been different had the cargo been covered. The partners decided against a $6,000 tarpaulin because the Coast Guard told them it wasn't necessary. But if the little old ladies from Morehead City hadn't gotten a look at the cargo, Hroncich says wistfully, "It could have been a different story."

As the barge continued from port to port, the story was the same: Cuba said no, and so did the little country of Belize. Mexico said it would dispatch gunboats if the barge tried to approach the Yucatan Peninsula. On the "Tonight" show, Johnny Carson had an idea for Capt. St. Pierre: "Do a U-e at Yemen . . . a hard left at Oman, up into the Gulf of Persia and -- there is Iran. Dump it right there."

On May 16, after two months at sea, the beleaguered garbage barge sailed back into New York Harbor under police escort and then dropped anchor in Brooklyn's Gravesend Bay. There it became a tourist attraction for almost four months while state and local officials battled in court about what to do with the trash, and others fretted over allegations by state investigators that three of the project's five silent partners had connections to organized crime.

Finally, in August, after four months of legal wrangling, an agreement was reached to burn the trash in Brooklyn and bury the ash at the Islip landfill. On Sept.1, the first truckload of ash was deposited atop the landfill without protest or fanfare. Frank Jones, then the Islip town supervisor, breathed a sigh of relief. "I am without question sick of the story," he said at the time.

A decade later, garbage is no longer much in the news, thanks, in part, to the way the barge focused attention on the problem. Nassau and Suffolk still generate about seven pounds of garbage per person per day, one of the highest rates in the country. But now, about half of Long Island's waste is incinerated in local waste-to-energy plants, while about 20 percent is now burned or buried off Long Island. And about 35 percent is recycled, a huge increase from pre-barge days. There are now only four active landfills in Nassau and Suffolk, and they only accept ash or clean fill -- no raw municipal garbage.

"The barge was one of those things that probably tweaked what we were already doing and made it more of a public issue than it would have otherwise," said R.L. Swanson, director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at the State University at Stony Brook. "The public got on the towns a little more."

For his part, Hroncich said, "We were just a little bit ahead of our time." He notes that the barge venture continues to be a topic of discussion at disposal seminars. "They always refer back to the Islip garbage barge as the turning point in waking up the politicians," he said. If nothing else, "It was an adventure."