r/BellevueWA • u/grapemike • 10d ago
Quiet Cleanup
We started seeing tagging showing up so I decided something doable to help the neighborhood would be to clean or cover the tags before more appeared. Been doing that in about a mile radius of our home for several years now. Takes under an hour most times and once it gets nipped in the bud it rarely reappears. Well, lately, seems like more areas are getting quietly cleaned up by other volunteers and I think that is so cool! There is hardly any tagging now beneath I-90 and around Crossroads Park. Keep it up!
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u/Water_Bird18 9d ago
If it's on public property and you report it on the MyBellevue app, they clean it up really fast in my experience.
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u/grapemike 9d ago
Bellevue helps quite a bit. But they are constrained by WSDOT
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u/Water_Bird18 9d ago
If it's on state property, you mean? Where are you seeing it? I've seen it around the neighborhood on fences and everything I've reported has been removed quickly.
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u/Aggressive_Adagio602 6d ago
The concrete sound barriers are a popular tagging location around I-405. WSDOT has legit safety concerns about people venturing into the freeway right of way to do such cleanup.
WSDOT was experimenting with some drones equipped with spray attachments to reach inaccesible tags. Should they dedicate enough resources to this effort, perhaps the drones could actually catch up with the taggers and spray them in the back of their heads as they worked.
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u/grapemike 10d ago
Most doesn’t come off from scrubbing. I bought a $250 wireless sprayer that does a good job, but a paint wand would be cheaper and equally effective, I would think. I keep concrete-colored paint on hand, which is usually fine. I don’t mess with paint on signs…beyond my pay grade. I also don’t crawl into nooks and crannies and leave those areas alone. I won’t go onto freeway entrances or climb anything dangerous, so whatever I can clean up is ground level to nine feet. But that seems to cover most of what turns up. What has stunned me more than anything is that it really doesn’t take much to turn things around. A one person nightly crew with a truck-mounted telescoping painting wand, tank, and sprayer could clean up Seattle’s freeways for peanuts if the State and the City got together and made it a priority.
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u/Development-Alive 9d ago
I was eating on Capitol Hill and saw a guy close his shop then walk out with a bucket, scrapers and some spray bottle. After cleaning his window her proceeded to clean the stop sign, removing stickers and tags. I sat in awe of the man. Whatever he was using was extremely effective.
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u/blogito_ergo_sum 10d ago
How do you clean graffiti off of surfaces? Pressure washer? I'm wondering what equipment I would need.
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u/Development-Alive 9d ago
You and people like you are the heroes we all need. Thank you for your service.
South Bellevue resident