Pumpkin Disposal Authority Begs Residents to Stop Putting Gourds in Storm Drains, Announces Curbside Compost Pilot

PORT ASTER — The Port Aster Pumpkin Disposal Authority issued an urgent public plea Thursday, begging residents to stop depositing carved pumpkins into storm drains, after sanitation crews pulled a 14-pound gourd from a culvert on Elm Street and declared it “the cork in the bottle.”

“A pumpkin is not a boat,” said Harlan Voss, the Authority’s Chief Gourd Officer, at a press conference held beside a flatbed truck loaded with what he described as “evidence.” “A pumpkin does not float gracefully away. A pumpkin wedges. A pumpkin swells. A pumpkin becomes, in the technical language of our field, a real problem.”

According to Authority figures, storm-drain pumpkin incidents are up 60 percent over last year, with 212 gourds recovered from the city’s drainage system since November 1. One drain on the city’s west side required a full excavation after what crews described as “a jack-o’-lantern of unusual structural integrity” formed a watertight seal engineers have nicknamed “the squash plug.”

In response, the Authority announced a curbside compost pilot program beginning Monday. Residents will receive bright orange collection bins — “so there is no confusion about what goes in them,” Voss said — and may place whole or carved pumpkins at the curb on regular yard-waste days. Pumpkins must be free of candles, glitter, and “googly eyes, which jam the grinder.”

“The grinder incident of last Tuesday will not be repeated,” Voss added, declining to elaborate.

The Authority estimates the average carved pumpkin weighs nine pounds and takes approximately 90 days to decompose in a home compost pile — “slightly longer if it has a face, for reasons science has not fully explained.” Residents who smash their pumpkins before binning them “for stress relief or sport” are asked to keep fragments larger than a golf ball, “for the dignity of the process.”

Repeat storm-drain offenders will receive a warning letter, a pamphlet titled “Your Pumpkin’s Second Life,” and, on the third offense, a personal visit from Voss himself. “I will come to your house,” he said. “I will stand on your porch. And I will explain, at length, the hydrology of gourds.”

The pilot program runs through December. If successful, the Authority says it will expand next year to include “hay bales, corn stalks, and whatever that inflatable thing was.”