It’s dark, but with the glare from overhead flood lights, Sonny Lynch, public works superintendent for the Town of Herndon, is able to inspect the damp downtown streets and sidewalks for garbage or other debris.
Less than five hours after the end of the annual Herndon Festival on a cool, drizzly summer night, it’s nearing 11 p.m. and Lynch has yet to retire home for sleep. Chomping lightly on a soggy, unlit cigar, the public works chief dressed in a damp windbreaker puts his hands on his hips and surveys the rest of the work that needs to be completed before the regular weekday commuter traffic returns to town in a few hours.
"This whole operation can take some time, it all just depends on what you’re dealing with that year," said Lynch, who has worked with Herndon’s Department of Public Works throughout the course of the festival’s 27-year history. "The carnival [rides] for instance, that takes awhile, and when it’s wet like this they don’t necessarily get that stuff out right away."
But what the public works staff can gather, like the hundreds of signs and feet of fencing, they typically do in one night, stacking it all up for its return to storage, the majority not to be seen until next year’s festival, Lynch said.
"You wouldn’t believe the amount of fencing that goes up until you see it all stacked up in one area," he said. "And then we’ve got the picnic tables and the barricades … there is a lot for us to get together."
RETURNING the town to its everyday appearance in the wake of the Herndon Festival’s average 70,000 patrons over four days requires a special kind of team effort, according to Bob Boxer, director of public works for the town.
"We have all our different areas for our guys, our building maintenance and our roads crews," Boxer said, "and with this event they can all come together in their own individual way to do all of the little jobs to get this festival moving smoothly and cleaned up when it’s over."
Every year the staff spends at least three weeks preparing the downtown area for the festival, Boxer added.
The Sunday-to-Monday overnight clean-up shift required the work of 22 different public works employees — about 30 percent of the total staff — many of whom were serving multiple shifts at the event. For this year’s festival, the Town of Herndon budgeted 2,360 public works service hours to manage and ultimately clean its grounds downtown, Lynch said. In addition, the staff employs the use of more than 15 different municipal vehicles and heavy construction equipment, he added.
Last year’s total bill for the Department of Public Works management of the festival was just above $50,000, according to Lynch.
THE MANAGEMENT process for the early June festival has been built around the same basic strategy for about the last 10 years, said Lynch, who has watched it evolve from a simple event involving a couple hundred people to a major multi-state carnival.
"When it all started it was all in the town hall yard, so the only thing we had to do was set up around that building and clean up the parking lot where we had the fireworks," he said. "Then it started to get bigger. It’s grown to five times as much ground as it was originally."
To best manage the project, the public works crew splits into five groups headed by different supervisors, each tasked with an individual responsibility ranging from gathering fencing, sweeping the streets and picking up litter.
The process consistently takes the crew the entire night to resolve.
"There ain’t nobody around here late at night, so you can get the job done in a fairly quick way," said David Higgins, a 22-year veteran streets supervisor working the overnight shift. "Last year we got out of here at the break of dawn … it’s looking this year like it will be at least four or five [a.m.] by the time we can pull out this morning."
THE CONCLUSION of the festival is far from the last thing that the town’s public works staff will be addressing downtown during the summer. A cornucopia of summer programming ranging from a weekly farmers market to a summer concert series to Fourth of July fireworks displays makes downtown clean-up routine, Boxer said.
"It’s amazing what goes on here in this area all summer. We have people out here just about every single week," he said. "The activities that we provide to the citizens is just non-stop this time of year … and they’re out there for all of them."
Despite the extra work required of everyone, there is something peaceful about working the overnight shift and seeing the sun rise on a town that has been reset to its everyday appearance, said Boxer.
"I think it’s a pride thing for our guys … they like making the town look brand new after these special events," he said. "And they do. Tomorrow morning, other than some of the carnival [rides] still here, to the people driving down Elden Street, it will look almost like [the festival] never happened."
The physical end of the festival doesn’t necessarily mean that its over for the public works crew, as they will continue to put in the extra hours all week to tie up the loose ends, said Higgins.
"It’s a long weekend for everyone. It’s a long couple weeks before hand and a long week after," said John Craft, an auto mechanic working the overnight shift. "You get it done, go home, go to bed and get up and do it again."
"That’s what we do every year around this time."