Alan Ashurst tracks Kansas City’s illegal dumpers
Code Enforcement Officer Alan Ashurst asks me if I have insurance. I chuckle.
“That’s a serious question,” he says. As I’m about to step on a pile of heroin needles, he adds, “Watch your step.”
Ashurst cruises the East Side in a city-issued, white Ford Focus, looking for signs of illegal dumping. He stops at a woodsy intersection of two dead-end roads, at East 33rd Terrace and Oakley.
The bald, 6-foot former Marine gazes through his black sunglasses at a pile of trash and yard waste. Since March, Ashurst has been searching out makeshift landfills like this one, with its three couches; tree branches; household trash; and a rat king of plastic cables, each stripped of copper wire. A used condom bakes in the sun.
