‘This is our parade’: Kansas City workers begin mass cleanup after Chiefs celebration
After thousands of football fans descended on downtown Kansas City on Wednesday for a parade to celebrate the latest Chiefs Super Bowl victory, roughly 200 city workers took to the streets to clean up a messy Grand Boulevard.
On Wednesday afternoon, a mess of litter — Chiefs placards, pizza boxes, beer cans, paper coffee cups, water bottles, and the like — covered the ground at the barriers up and down Grand. City workers were out in full force as they planned to move the discarded trash into the street so sweepers could come through and clear away the layer of garbage.
Russell Hill and Jon Lee, with the Parks and Recreation Department, were at the top of the route near Sixth Street as the mass cleaning effort was getting underway. Sporting yellow vests, they said they caught bits of the parade on TV before coming down — and were working a 16-hour shift as snowfall was predicted to hit late Wednesday.
“This is our parade,” said Hill.
“This is our parade. You’re looking at it,” added Lee.
Sherae Honeycutt, a city spokeswoman, said the plan initially was to have about 80 workers on the street to deal with cleanup. Earlier Wednesday, that changed to about 200 total, from Public Works, Parks and Recreation and Kansas City Water.
Garbage trucks, including one featuring a poster cutout of Patrick Mahomes, took down Grand Avenue as part of a convoy of city vehicles traveling the parade route as streets remained closed. Armed with leaf-blowers, brooms and reach extenders, the city workers picked up the bits of trash discarded by parade-goers.
In 2020, when the last Super Bowl victory was celebrated downtown, the major cleanup effort lasted past nightfall and continued on as streets were re-opened to traffic.
This time, the city plans to keep streets closed longer so that the cleaners can do their jobs. The streets will be opened section by section as they are cleaned, Honeycutt said in an emailed statement.
The cleanup efforts were expected to take about six hours.
One advantage for the city this year, as compared with last time: In 2020 a Post Malone concert was going on at the T-Mobile Center the night of the parade, which brought more traffic downtown. There are no events scheduled at the T-Mobile center Wednesday night.
Once city workers finish the parade cleanup, they expect to transition to snow operations. Snow and other precipitation was expected to roll in overnight Wednesday across the metro area and continue into the day Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.
This story was originally published February 15, 2023 at 6:38 PM.
