Squinting through her car headlights in the early dawn, it looked like some sort of surrealist horror. Weighing just short of 30 tonnes, the enormous pile of rubbish had appeared on Elaine Hutchings’ doorstep in Lichfield overnight. “The road was carnage,” she says. The smell of mildew was nauseating. Granted, Hutchings is only 5ft (1.52 metres) tall – but the heap loomed over her. “I just stood there in shock.”
Discernible among the bricks and rubble were toilet seats, office chairs, school exam papers from 15 years ago and, somehow compounding the absurdity of it all, a single hairdryer. “Nothing would surprise me as to what was in there,” says the 54-year-old business director. “It could have cost someone their life. I was so upset that somebody would even consider doing that without a thought for anybody.”
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