Residents kick up a stink over bin strike

ROTTING waste, rats scurrying along pavements, residents chasing the rare bin lorry down the street.

- Richard Ashmore

Chaos has come to Britain's second city, which is drowning in rubbish as industrial action between refuse workers and the Labour-run city council hits its fourth month.

But as councillors and unions quibble, it is the ordinary people in Birmingham's Bordesley Green and Heartlands areas who are suffering with stinking overflowing heaps of trash and thousands of rats.

Walking around the roads this week it is not an exaggeration to say every street corner has its own pile of rotting bin bags. They are stacked six-foot high in places and stretch along pavements.

Vermin

The spring sunshine helps waft the unpleasant smell of decaying food and waste from the bags. As I walked down one side street a large rat lay dead on the pavement, just as a mother was passing by with her small child in a pram.

On another corner a festering mound of waste sat next to a nursery, where workers walk children in the road to avoid the debris and vermin. Pensioner Margaret Gurney, 81, was awoken in the night when a live rat brought in by her cat started running around the house.