How to reduce your illegal-dumping backlog.

Why backlogs grow even when crews work hard

Most illegal-dumping backlogs grow for three reasons that have nothing to do with crew effort:

• Bad work orders. Reports with wrong locations, wrong sizes, or wrong contents send crews to the wrong place or the wrong equipment.
• Ghost orders. Sites that were already cleaned stay open, so the same address keeps collecting trips.
• Duplicate reports. The same pile reported five times becomes five work orders — five chances to waste a trip.

None of these show up in a backlog count. That is the point: a queue built from unverified reports measures noise, not need.

What changes with verified ground truth

• You clear the right things first. Piles are ranked by verified size, location, and repeat-offender status — not by the order tickets landed.
• You stop re-visiting cleaned sites. The next flight confirms the cleanup and closes the order.
• You find the misses. Aerial coverage surfaces piles that were never reported, so the queue reflects what is actually on the street.
• You can prove progress. Detection-to-cleanup chains give leadership a defensible measure of outcome, not activity.

In our Bayview-Hunters Point pilot, a 13-month aerial program drove active dumpsites down 96% and filed more than 1,500 verified reports to SF 311.

A realistic sequence

• Baseline one area. Count active sites and review open work orders for missing photos, location errors, and duplicates.
• Fly a fixed route. Repeatable coverage so week-over-week change is measured, not estimated.
• Triage the queue. Correct, consolidate, and close — then open the next area.

Expect an accurate queue to grow at first as unreported dumping is found. Measure street conditions, not ticket counts alone.