We have one full time graffiti clean-up crew in the Puget Sound area that can clean up top 5,000 square feet of graffiti per day. We rely on reports from drivers, the city of Seattle's graffiti patrol and past history to help prioritize where to send our crews.
Graffiti cleanup challenges
Our goal is to clean up graffiti as quickly as possible. Our patrol works four days a week taking care of small problems before they become big problems. Typically our crew has a turnaround time of 48 hours between the time they receive a report and the graffiti is cleaned. However, the crew faces challenges in urban and suburban areas that sometimes slow their efforts.
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Rain: Our clean up crew uses paint to cover up graffiti. During inclement weather work is stalled because paint will not stick to a wet surface. We have used other methods in the past such as pressure washing, however paint has been the most efficient way to cover up graffiti in most areas. |
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Maintaining efficiency: Now with only one full time graffiti crew we aim to make the best use of their time and our resources. Graffiti cleanup sites are grouped together by location and then prioritized. Our crew cleans up all the graffiti in one area before moving on to the next spot. Some graffiti may stay up longer because we are concentrating our efforts on an area with more graffiti. |
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Difficult-to-clean surfaces: Graffiti cleanup on high structures require a bucket truck and lane closures. Graffiti in most tunnels requires special closures to wash graffiti off tunnel tiles. Cleanup is scheduled to coincide with regular maintenance or during off-peak hours to minimize delays for drivers. Highway signs also need to be washed; a process that takes much longer then painting over graffiti. These challenges prevent us from cleaning these areas on our regular daily rounds. |
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Statistics from March 2007 through February 2008:
- covered 273, 997 square feet (the equivalent of nearly 5 football fields) of graffiti.
- spent nearly $133,367 on graffiti cleanup, a 23 percent increase from the previous year.
- spent 2,946 hours cleaning graffiti, nearly half the amount we spent the year prior.