Used hypodermic needles were found in a downtown LaGrange trash container, prompting officials to issue Kevlar gloves to street department crews charged with emptying those trash cans. Staff photo by Patrick Redmond
LAGRANGE — LaGrange street crews are now wearing special gloves when they pick up trash collected in downtown containers after workers discovered several used hypodermic needles in one of the containers.
The town purchased special Kevlar gloves for workers in its street department to wear, providing them with a bit of protection from accidentally being stabbed by used needles.
LaGrange Town Manager Mark Eagleson said workers discovered the needles in May.
“We found some syringes in one of our trash cans uptown, so that prompted me to think that we have to — to the best of our ability — protect our workers,” Eagleson said.
Eagleson said street department workers have to almost blindly reach inside the trash containers in order to grab the trash bags.
The heavy-duty, puncture-resistant gloves offer a level of safety against the biological hazard presented by used needles.
“Nothing is 100 percent, but the gloves have Kevlar in them, so they’re suppose to be Level 4, puncture/cut-resistant,” he added. “It’s just a step we felt like we had to take to keep them (the street department workers) safe.”
LaGrange has several trash containers sitting in the downtown area. Eagleson said he doesn’t know what the found needles were used for, but they looked like the type of needle with which a diabetic might inject insulin.
“We’re going to hope that somebody just got rid of their insulin stuff, but you can’t know,” Eagleson said. “And you can’t take the risk — not right now with all the stuff going on, including the seeming surge in heroin we read about in the papers. We just don’t need to take that risk if we can try to avoid it.”
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