Despite having a nearly 10-foot pile of wet trash in the parking lot of his Silver Spring business, Ken Lubel was in a pretty good mood Wednesday.
“I haven’t lost my cool totally,” Lubel said. “It’s a little frightful, it doesn’t smell very good.”
The situation started around noon Wednesday when a trash truck caught fire near Tires of Silver Spring Inc. at the intersection of Georgia Avenue and East West Highway.
Lubel said he watched as the driver of the truck pulled up in front of his parking lot.
“His load was smoking,” Lubel said. “He got up on the top of the truck with a fire extinguisher and couldn’t stop it. So he called the firefighters. The firefighters came, they couldn’t put it out. So the driver told me, ‘I’m going to dump it in your lot.’ I said ‘No, you’re not.’ And then he got up on the top of the truck, pulled a lever and did it.”
After the contents were dumped, county firefighters were able to extinguish the fire. But the wet trash pile remained in the parking lot.
Lubel said the trash company told him it was planning to return Wednesday to clean up the mess with a Bobcat and then it would power-wash his parking lot.
Twitter user @dlemen shared this scene he captured from a traffic camera of the scene with emergency workers and the trash truck present.