Large needle pile found in neighborhood

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - Dozens of used needles were found piled high in a Buffalo neighborhood.

The mayor's impact team, which cleans up areas across the city, found the pile Wednesday morning and say it goes well beyond what they normally pick up from the streets. The syringes were found at the end of Hudson Street near the thruway.

Zachary Barrett said, "It's a shock. You don't expect to see that. When we got under the bridge we found a bunch of heroin needles, spoons, empty drug bags. It was quite surprising being over there. We weren't expecting that. We found some empty mattresses, blankets, all sorts of stuff under there; it appeared somebody was living underneath there where they were using."

The crew tried staying away from the visibly exposed needles, and didn't know what to do about them.

"All we have on are our work gloves, so you're not trying to get pricked. You have to worry about the dangers of HIV and other things. It's definitely something where we wanted to be very cautious when we were cleaning up," Barrett said.

He may have been surprised, but Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein was not.

"Unfortunately, this is a big drug trafficking area. There's a lot of drug use there, there's a lot of sales of drugs, there's a lot of disposal of needles and paraphernalia. This is a high-use area," she said.

The health commissioner says if you do see something, the most important thing is not to clean it up yourself.

Dr. Burstein said, "You don't know what it's been exposed to. Please, we want you to call us at the health department, it's 961-6800 to call our environmental health folks and we actually have a team assembled that can go out that will dispose of the needles and whatever paraphernalia safely."

She sent one of those teams to the area, who found more and more exposed needles after moving leaves and picking up pieces of trash. Dr. Burstein says her department is passing out disposal kits to help stop these piles from popping up. Find more information about that here.

"We're not being judgmental. People are doing what they're doing but we're trying to help them be safe and not just for themselves to be safe but for the community to be safe. It's not fair for kids playing in the park to come across needles. It's not fair for garbage men to expose themselves and it's just not fair for the community so we want to make it safe," Dr. Burstein said.