photo by: Mike Yoder/Journal-World Photo

In this file photo, Charles Barnes, operator of one of the city's automated pickup trash trucks, uses a mechanical arm to lift city trash bins off the street in the Prairie Park neighborhood.

Low temperatures are creating high stress levels for the city’s trash and recycling crews.

On Wednesday, businesses across Lawrence won’t have their trash picked up, and recycling bins at residences won’t be serviced either, a city official has confirmed. That will be the second day in a row that the city has had to suspend the key services.

Ron Green, the city’s solid waste department general manager, told the Journal-World that 12 of the city’s 21 solid waste trucks have suffered mechanical failures due to the extremely cold weather.

Green said the entire garbage truck fleet was recently serviced with a “winter diesel blend,” but that “it appears the fuel is gelling, even though we’ve put in additive upon additive.” Green said that under the sub-zero conditions of the past week, “nothing seems to work.”

“Either they won’t start, or they won’t continue to run after they start,” Green said. “Hopefully by next week this will be a bad memory.”

Green said that mechanics have been working on the issue since 7 a.m. Tuesday but have not succeeded in making the necessary repairs.

“I was hoping to have at least half of them repaired by now,” he said.

Of the nine trash trucks currently available, five are rear-loaders, meaning that crew members are positioned on the back of the truck. That is requiring the city to take special precautions to keep those trucks in operation.

Green said that additional operators are following the trash trucks so that employees riding on the rear of the trucks, who are exposed to the weather, can be replaced with new workers. Green described the last few days of operations as a “Herculean effort.”

“The crew is actually picking up the (trash) carts, and every half hour or so we rotate them,” he said.

Green said that his crew of approximately 80 employees was at maximum capacity on Tuesday.

“They’re devoted and take pride in their work,” he said. “They’re also helping the mechanics with trying to get the trucks running.”

The city also has side-loader trash trucks, which have mechanical arms that are controlled from inside the trucks and allow trash carts to be lifted and dumped without employees getting out of the cab of the truck. A handful of those trucks have remained in service during the cold weather, but many have not been operational. That means residents likely will need to wait longer for their trash bins to be serviced.

“It’s probably added two hours to our day,” Green said.

But Green said residential trash routes in Lawrence were serviced on Tuesday, and he said he expects the same for Wednesday.