Vandals decline to turn over a new leaf

I took the kids to Five Dock Park for their first frolic of the year, and on the way, we went past two smashed up bus shelters outside Domremy College.  All the glass in both shelters had been attacked.  It must be pretty tough stuff, because only one chunk of glass fell out of this shelter and onto the path.

Until Council fixes it, these won't be very pleasant places to wait for a bus.  Not what I would call an encouraging start to getting people onto public transport this year.    Trouble is, I can't raise anyone at Council today to get this seen to - at the very least, the broken pane should be removed or covered up to stop someone cutting themselves on it, and the glass on the ground removed.

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Update - rang Council this morning (2 Jan).  They said they'd get someone over quick smart to clean up the glass on the ground.

Weekly wrapup

I reported the Citreon below to Council mid week - they've moved quickly and have already slapped an orange "we're going to take this car away" sticker on it.  The rego ran out over a year ago, and it hasn't moved since.

It hasn't moved for a long time because part of the suspension has come undone and smashed up into the bonnet.  Even if you did want to move it, you'd need a tow truck.

The Council anti-graffiti team have also taken no time at all to clean a messy tag off this sign at Dobroyd Point.  I reported it mid-week, and it is gone already.  It just goes to show that small, but irritating, things can be quickly taken care of - if they are reported.

Must remember to report this Energy Australia kiosk at Five Dock park.  It was cleaned a few months ago, but is attracting graffiti again.

I thought the awful weather of late would have discouraged kids from partying in the park late at night (and leaving their rubbish and graffiti behind), but they are made of sterner stuff than I imagined.  A spot of rain won't stop them from drinking and making a mess.

Both sides of this grandstand are regularly vandalised on weekends, and the Council has to send a team around on Monday morning to take care of the damage.  I'm going to have a chat with the Mayor about seeing if he can adjust the work hours of the Rangers so that they can patrol the park after dark on weekends.

The kids playground and the early childhood centre in the park have been thoroughly vandalised as well.  

Just about every bit of playground equipment has numerous tags on it, some of them by this "princess gigi", complete with butterflies or flowers (or are they just blowflies that she has drawn?)  This is the first time I have ever seen graffiti that is positively feminine in nature.  The last thing we need is equal numbers of girls vandalising our local environment.

I've reported this to Council via their excellent graffiti reporting website (which only works with IE - forget about using it with Firefox or Safari).

Six wins and one fail

A good day today (although not all this was fixed this week).  I reported this playground a month or two ago - it was quickly cleaned by Council, and has remained in that state ever since.  It shows that vandalism can sometimes be a random or one off event, rather than a steady stream of attacks.  In this case, the park has been cleaned up, and has been graffiti-free since.  It shows that it is worth removing graffiti, because then residents can enjoy (in this instance) a graffiti-free park for months on end.

Five Dock Park - a crew went through today and painted over the graffiti on all the park furniture.  All the benches had a "wet paint" sign like this one on them.

Sydney Water have replaced the corroded vent pipe with a brand new, green pipe.  It blended in so well, I walked straight past it before thinking about going back and looking for it.

Graffiti has been removed from the side of the Early Childhood Centre.

The gate to this playground has been repaired - and I completely forgot about reporting it.  Either someone is reading this blog, or a sharp-eyed Council employee has noticed it and fixed it.

The Council graffiti crew in action again around the grandstand in Five Dock Park.  After the mess that was made the previous weekend, I presume Council management thought that it would be a good idea to have staff back in the park on the first day after the weekend to see if any damage needed attending to.  Now that's the forward thinking, proactive stuff that Australia Post should be thinking about.

The one fail was on Crane St, near Concord High School.  On the weekend, the concrete barriers dividing Crane St were repainted and clean.  Today, they had already been hit with a few tags.  Council are just going to have to paint and paint and paint those barriers until the little sods give up and find something better to do - like train surfing.

Another result

I was going past Five Dock Park about an hour ago and spotted the Council graffiti removal truck next to the grandstand.  

All the graffiti has gone from the water tank, and as I watched, the last bits on the grandstand disappeared.

A roller and a bit of paint makes short work of graffiti on a well rendered wall.

A police car was parked just up the street.  I don't know whether they were there to investigate all the damage in the park, or dealing with another matter in one of the houses along this street.

Whatever.  It's a good result - and quick too.  All the broken glass around the grandstand has gone as well.  Our Council doesn't drag its feet - but they can't act on a problem if they don't know about it.  

Who should pick this up?

I think I forgot to include this in my recent batch of photos from Five Dock Park.  It looked to me like some kids had organised a party in the park, and the result was broken bottles here, there and everywhere.

I reported this to Council on Monday morning (not this one beer bottle - the dozen or more smashed ones around the grandstand, and others like this one scattered through the BBQ area).

From now on, I'm going to take a plastic bag and my folding picker-upper grabby thing to the park so that I can take care of little "accidents" like this one beer bottle.  I feel some satisfaction knowing that Council will take care of cleaning this up, but it wouldn't make me feel any better to learn that between me spotting it and Council removing it, that a kid had stepped on this glass and ended up in hospital with a foot full of stitches.  

The park is not my personal property.

I didn't break the beer bottle.

But I still think that the best thing I can do is pick it up as soon as I see it and chuck it in the bin.  Reporting it to Council is the least worst option.  

Whatever you do, don't take the worst option, which is to walk past and treat it as somebody else's problem.  That sucks almost as badly as the little cretin who deliberately broke this bottle in the first place.

Five Dock Park - part III

I did another walk through Five Dock Park this morning, finding even more mess and mayhem. A number of picnic tables have ended up like this one - covered in a scrawl of tags.



The side of the grandstand and the water tank next to it have been liberally coated in graffiti.



The water tank.



The side of the grandstand. This was clean a few weeks ago.



The following photos might explain the source of the graffiti. The area around the grandstand is coated with broken glass from stubbies - Tooheys New, Vodka Kruisers and Wild Turkey pre-mixes. There are also at least 4 empty cardboard cartons bearing the logos of the above, so someone has had a pretty good party in this spot.



The red circles all indicate big chunks of grass. There are also bottles left on the oval near the cricket pitch, and bottles smashed elsewhere throughout the park, with glass left in the grass or on the footpaths.




Wild Turkey pre-mixes, smashed and unsmashed.




A sea of broken glass.


I've used the Council web site for reporting graffiti and logged the graffiti as job ref 88859. I'll have to ring Council on Monday morning and tell them about all the broken glass.

The wire that I am holding in the photo below has been ripped off the side of the grandstand - I think it's part of the PA system for the ground. Simple mindless destruction.

I'm all for having a party - I drank plenty of illicit booze as a teenager in parks like this. But we always cleaned up after ourselves (less chance of getting caught if no one complains) and never wrecked stuff like this.

Monday morning update - all this has been reported to Council. I rang 9911 6555 and let them know. Someone's going to have a fun day (not) cleaning up after these little cretins.

Five Dock Park - part II

More trouble in Five Dock Park.  This is a drinking fountain that has been badly beaten around the head and gummed up with cigarette butts.  Just the sort of thing you want your kids to be drinking out of when they are thirsty.

I wrote earlier this week that you rarely see any non-McDonalds fast food rubbish around the place.  Well, I was wrong, and I recant.  Five Dock Park is littered with Subway food wrappings from end to end.  Each red circle denotes a bit of rubbish sitting on the grass.

And don't forget Pizza Hut.

Note that all the rubbish in this photo is quite near a rubbish bin.

A tag on a BBQ - this will come off in a few seconds with some metho and a rag.

I suspect that the rubbish on the ground is half human-caused and half ibis-caused.  I have seen these fellows up to their necks in the rubbish bins.  

Five Dock Park

Poor old Five Dock Park really takes a beating.  I wrote to Council last and asked if they have established a "friends of the park" group yet for this park.  (It's part of the Council playground strategy to setup a "friends" program.  This park really needs one.

The Early Childhood centre had graffiti removed from this spot recently, and it has returned once more.  It's like mould in the bathroom - very hard to keep under control.

There are plenty of benches throughout the park, and some of them look like this.  (By the way, that red circle in the top right corner is a vandalised Energy Australia substation, mentioned in the next blog).

Another vandalised bench.  Note that most of the graffiti has been applied with a marker pen, rather than spray paint.  This is why I don't believe that banning spray paint will have much effect.  If you ask me, marker pens are the precursor to moving onto spray paint.  Young kids (12 and up) can easily buy a marker pen from a newsagency and start a life of vandalism, before graduating some years later to spray paint.  

A very rusted ventilation pipe.  I reported this to Sydney Water last month, and haven't seen any action yet.

The bottom of the ventilation pipe is almost non-existant.  If it wasn't for the supporting struts, this would have toppled long ago.

Many of the lamp posts have been defaced, again with a marker pen rather than spray paint.  Note that vandals prefer a marker pen with a fat nib - perhaps an Artline 100 or 130 series.  In my humble opinion, I'd start by banning fat marker pens.

Someone has trashed this rubbish bin.

Some good news though - this sign has been thoroughly cleaned by Council.  The Council anti-graffiti team seems to be the most thorough when it comes to removing graffiti - they really do a good job.  The RTA on the other hand tend to do a really sloppy, slap-dash job when it comes to cleaning signage.  

The gate to the playground has been broken - again.  I'll have to include that in my report to Council on Monday.  This is the second time that this has been snapped off.  I doubt that a small child did this - by the look of the rest of the park, it appears that some teenagers have had a wild time here recently, trashing trees and bins and breaking anything they can.  

When I went to the playground this morning, there were a number of other families there, playing with their kids.  All the adults had noticed this damage - but why, as usual, am I the only one to report it?

I really must remember to get some flyers printed and start handing them out to parents when I see things like this.