America the Messy Yard Police State

Messy yard cops hate hoarders???

  Our government masters tell us they are "public servants", but servants are supposed to serve you, not order you how to run your life to make their jobs easy.

So it seems our government masters are not the "public servants" they claim to be, but the same royal rulers the Founders overthrew.

Source

Dangers of hoarding can extend outside the home

By Cecilia Chan and Laurie Merrill The Arizona Republic-12 News , Breaking News Team Thu May 9, 2013 10:50 PM

It took a decade of complaints for officials to condemn the home of a Scottsdale recluse and seize 13 large tortoises, 13 exotic birds and a dog from his reeking, fly- infested home.

Neighbors in the 8700 block of East Sage Drive had complained for years about the elderly man who hoarded animals. It wasn’t just the smell and the flies, they said; it was also the untended forest of vegetation in his front yard.

Lately, the reeking had gotten worse.

“It was the smell of death,” neighbor Ann Sespico said. “You couldn’t be in your backyard.”

When police officers entered the house on Monday, they found more than a dozen tortoises in the backyard. Five were dead, Scottsdale police spokesman Dave Pubins said.

The animal-filled home in Scottsdale and the debris-packed house recently found in Phoenix hurt the quality of life in the neighborhoods, experts say.

Though the number of people plagued by a powerless need to collect worthless items and accumulate dozens of pets is not rising in the Valley, residents are becoming increasingly aware of the hoarders in their midst.

Hoarding poses a danger for first-responders whose lives are imperiled by the especially hot fires and narrow passageways.

While Scottsdale police officers were seizing the macaws, African grays and tortoises, a fire broke out in the kitchen next to a faulty microwave. Officials told neighbors one of the birds had been pecking on a wire.

Scottsdale firefighters responded and quelled the smoky blaze. But without such a swift response, there is no telling how much damage it could have caused to surrounding houses.

On a recent night, Phoenix firefighters found themselves battling a raging house fire that posed challenges — a house full of clutter that fueled flames and blocked their entry.

“It was packed almost to the ceiling,” fire spokesman Tony Mure said about the Maryvale house in west Phoenix. “Firefighters could not get into the front door.”

Firefighters broke the lock but couldn’t open the door because it was blocked by a wall made up of stacked paper and other items, Mure said. Firefighters finally busted a window and crawled precariously through the house atop piles of clutter, dragging their hose.

“It was very dangerous for our firefighters to be crawling on something that is three-dimensional and lose your footing,” Mure said. Neighbors later told firefighters that the owner had not lived in the house for some time.

Lack of regulation

Phoenix has no laws regulating hoarding, except when it involves animal cruelty. Nor is hoarding against the law in Scottsdale.

“We don’t dictate how people live within their own home,” Phoenix spokeswoman Barb Fraser said.

The city prohibits the storage of personal items that are visible such as in a front yard or carport, said Tim Boling, deputy director of the Phoenix Neighborhood Services Department.

Inspectors can only cite for blight violations outside the home, he said, adding that inspectors try to educate the resident of the dangers of hoarding if they see signs of it in the house.

“It’s like smoking in bed,” Boling said. “There’s no law against it but you know it’s not a good thing to do. It’s a hazard but people still do it.”

Scottsdale officials had been working with the hoarder whose animals were seized, neighbors involved in the case said. Officials had responded to neighbor’s complaints at least twice a year, said Raun Keagy, Scottsdale planning, neighborhood and transportation director.

The resident was cited twice, once in 2005 for having an overgrown front yard, and again in 2007, for overgrowth as well as having an inoperable vehicle in his driveway, Keagy said. Both times, he paid the fines and brought his property into compliance, Keagy said.

But neighbors said any compliance was at best temporary, and that the stench, ticks, flies, mosquitoes and overgrowth were the norm.

Fires harder to fight

One elderly Phoenix couple learned the hard way about the dangers of their compulsive hoarding — their home burned down as a result, city officials said.

The couple had crammed their home near 26th Street and Cactus Road with newspapers, bicycle parts, appliances and other items, Boling said.

After the fire, the couple lived in their backyard with no water, electricity or bathroom facilities, and refused to clean up the property and repair the fire damage to the home, prompting city inspectors to intervene.

“We received complaints from neighbors,” Boling said. “They had storage outside the home visible to the next-door neighbor.”

The house was red-tagged as unfit to occupy, he said.

“So under those circumstances we sent a notice of violation, either board it up, demolish it or fix it,” he said.

Eventually, the couple sold their home and the new owners are cleaning up the property, city officials said.

“The sale of the property was the best result for everyone involved,” Boling said.

Hoarders hard to track

Boling said Phoenix doesn’t keep numbers on hoarding.

“There’s no way to track it or ID it,” he said. “The only way we find it a lot of time is if there is a fire at a house and a fire department goes there and once they get the fire out they see it’s a hoarder situation, stacks of newspapers that keep the fire ignited and created a big problem for them.”

Mure said that in his 20-year career with Phoenix Fire Department, he’s encountered 20 to 30 cases of hoarding. And just about every firefighter in the department has seen it, he said.

Mure has been to a medical call where a resident kept 25 cats in the house and “the ammonia smell was so bad you wanted to puke.” Hehas treated someone with chest pains in a home scattered with human and animal feces, he said.

Mary Dickson, co-founder of the Arizona Hoarding Task Force, said an estimated 5 percent of the nation’s population is dealing with hoarding. [So the one percent of the populations that are neat freaks like the "Odd Couple's" Felix Ungar, wants to terrorize the 5 percent of us that are slobs like the "Odd Couple's" Oscar Madison]

The task force, formed in 2010 as a statewide collaborative resource on the issue, includes members who work in social work, public safety and code enforcement. Dickson is a building official for El Mirage.

Dickson said hoarding is not on the increase but rather more people are becoming aware of the issue through TV reality shows such as “Hoarders” and “Hoarding: Buried Alive.”

“It’s always been there in some form or another,” she said. “People are becoming less embarrassed to come out on it.”

The task force looks for three key criterion in determining a hoarding situation: collecting things that appear useless, living spaces that can’t be used because of clutter and impairment in functioning caused by hoarding.

“It doesn’t have to be all three but one of those three,” Dickson said.

A progressive disease

Hoarding is a psychological disorder that is triggered by a traumatic life-altering event such as a death of a spouse, divorce or job loss, she said.

“The tendency to hoard starts in adolescence,” Dickson said. “It crosses all boundaries—age, sex, ethnicity and economic levels.”

This month, the American Psychiatric Association will officially recognize hoarding as a mental disorder instead of clumping it with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Hoarders also put themselves as risk with their inability to throw anything away.

If a fire were to occur, the resident might be blocked from getting to the door, or emergency responders may not be able to find the person, she said.

In April, a New Jersey woman was found dead in her cluttered apartment two months after she was reported missing, according to the Associated Press. Her mummified body was hidden beneath clothing and debris that apparently hid her presence during earlier searches, the news organization reported.

Dickson said in many hoarding cases, lack of sanitation also comes into play; the shower or toilet doesn’t work or the kitchen is so full of junk, people can’t properly cook their food.

Mure said he’s been on medical calls where it was difficult for responders to reach someone in a back bedroom because of the clutter.

“Usually, you don’t see clean, immaculate kitchens and bathrooms that are sparkling,” Mure said. “Everything is run-down, everything is packed and piled on. You can’t physically put your foot on the floor without stepping on piles of paper, old soda cans, plastic bottles and trash.

“Usually when it gets in that situation, there’s stagnant air, cockroaches and mice. It’s an unhealthy situation for people.”

 
 

America the Messy Yard Police State