Waste Management of Orange County is one of several commercial haulers working within the City of Irvine. While much of their fleet is very modern, they still have several interesting garbage trucks that prompted us to take a trip out here before new "Think Green, Think Clean" trucks take their place.
(0:00) - 207932: For many months now, Moises and I have been talking about these old beast. The Irvine yard has a handful of old CNG Macks, and as far as I know, they are some of the few Macks ever bought CNG. Aside from Irvine, the only other WM CNG Macks I've seen from this generation are the old PASCO trucks from Palo Alto, California, however those ended up with GreenWaste Recovery after they were sold off. Anyway, I realized that some of these trucks have been getting retired and scrapped, yet there's hardly any footage of them on KZfaq. To make things more difficult, many of the remaining Mack Wittkes are spare trucks, so neither Moises or myself knew of a route to look on. Last week, however, Moises followed this truck from Sunset Environmental Transfer Station and talked with the driver, Boni. He found out that Boni uses this truck regularly only ONCE a week, as it has a special permit to collect at the San Onofre Power Plant that no other truck has. Once I found out that news, Kevin, Moises and I made plans to head out here to finally capture one of these Macks. So a big thanks to Moises for helping us track down this truck. Very, very enjoyable to watch. Boni revs very well, and the truck lets out some nice puffs of smoke. He also takes good care of his customers, as demonstrated with him taking the sofa. He really likes the truck and says they are better than the new FLs that Irvine has.
(6:03) - 264111: Besides the Macks, this is the only other old front loader that Irvine still has, and the history of this truck made Kevin and I want to find it quick. This truck was registered to Waste Management of the Desert almost 12 years ago, on November 16, 2005. Less than a year later, this truck was sent to Irvine when WM sold off the Desert assets to Burrtec. As of now, it is one of the spares for Irvine, and is actually designated for replacement unfortunately. Today, when Kevin and I went to the yard, we didn't see this truck inside, so we figured it must've been on route. As we looked around the Friday route for a resi truck, we ended up right by UCI, and saw this truck coming towards us. Excited, we followed the driver for a few miles to his next stop. Thankfully, Juan was super cool and let us follow him as long as we wanted. He usually does the organics route with an ACX/Amrep but thankfully that was down. I was glad to see this truck again, as the last time I saw this truck was back in La Habra when WM was still working there. Some of the stops had carts, so that was fun to watch get collected! He even used auto-rev when dumping the carts, something I didn't get to see when I found this truck in La Habra.
Thanks to Boni and Juan for being so cool and answering all the questions we had about the trucks! And thanks to Kevin and Moises for making this trip so successful - really glad to see some of the old trucks left in Orange County!