Dumpster Rental in Wasena, VA

Roll-off containers for Wasena homes and jobsites

Wasena is a small, tightly held neighborhood on the south bank of the Roanoke River, between the Wasena bridge and the Grandin side of the city. It belongs to the City of Roanoke, which is an independent city and is not part of Roanoke County, and that jurisdictional fact governs every permit question on these streets. The houses are traditional-era, mostly 1920s and 1930s bungalows, foursquares and Colonial Revivals on lots of five to seven thousand square feet, on grid streets wide enough for a driveway. Wasena Park and the Roanoke River Greenway form the northern edge, and the river is the reason this page reads differently from the others.

Roanoke’s defining weather event happened here. On the night of 4 November 1985 the Roanoke River crested at 23.35 feet against a 10-foot flood stage, on 6.61 inches of rain in twenty-four hours, and that rainfall total is still the record. At least ten people died in the valley. The answer, decades later, was the USACE Roanoke River Flood Reduction Project. Anyone who lived through 1985 in this part of Roanoke remembers exactly where the water reached, and forty years on it is still the reference point locals use when the river comes up. For our purposes the lesson is practical: flood and storm debris is wet, and wet debris is heavy. Saturated drywall, carpet and pad, subfloor and fiberglass insulation will bring a container to its payload limit at maybe half its rated volume. When a basement or a lower level takes water in Wasena, the right box is a 10 or a 15 loaded flat and low, not a 30 that cannot be moved.

The rest of the year the work is ordinary city work. Kitchen and bath renovation, roof tear-offs, attic and basement clearances, and porch and deck rebuilds. Fifty-five percent of the City of Roanoke’s 44,543 housing units were built before 1960, so most of what happens in Wasena is pre-1978 work under the federal EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, EPA-administered in Virginia. Window replacement and demolition are covered every time. Termite infestation probability is rated SEVERE for the City of Roanoke, and in a neighborhood with this much crawlspace and this much moisture off the river, rotten sill plate and band joist is a regular find. That is heavy, dense debris in small volume.

Placement is generally easy. Wasena’s streets are wider than the older grid downtown and most houses have a usable driveway, so a container sits on private property and the City permit question never arises. Where a street placement is needed we file for it and we carry the insurance the City requires. Roanoke averages 42.82 inches of precipitation and 14.8 inches of snow a year, per the 1991 to 2020 normals for the airport station published by NWS Blacksburg, which means a couple of disrupted days most winters and a lot more rain days than snow days. Wasena also gets its share of tree work, because the mature canopy along these streets comes down in sections after a summer storm, and green wood is one of the densest things anyone puts in a container. Call (540) 685-0739 with the street, the surface and what is going in the box, and we will size it before we price it. We have been doing this in the valley since 2012 and the phone is the fastest way to get a straight answer.

What we know about working in Wasena

Wasena is City of Roanoke, so city rules govern. On your own driveway a container needs no permit. In the street, the alley or on the sidewalk it needs the City of Roanoke Dumpster and Portable Storage Container Permit from the Transportation Division of Public Works, under City Code sections 14.1-41 through 14.1-46 and section 30-2. Apply at least 10 calendar days ahead. The City requires a certificate of public liability insurance of not less than one million dollars per occurrence naming the City of Roanoke as an additional insured. A dumpster may stay 30 consecutive days; a PODS-type container gets 7. Thirty feet from stop signs, stop bars, crosswalks and intersections; five feet from driveways; no blocking walkways or hydrants; a 10-foot travel lane kept open at all times; traffic cones and reflective tape in place at all times; contact information on at least two sides; adjacent residences and businesses notified. Fees are not published, so contact the Transportation Division. Flood work has its own rules of thumb on this side of the river. Weight, not volume, decides the size. Saturated drywall and carpet run far heavier than the dry equivalent, and a container loaded to the top rail with wet material can exceed what the truck can legally haul off the street. Load flat and low. Keep the heaviest material over the axles rather than at the door end. Separate out anything that is genuinely hazardous, because household hazardous waste in this valley goes to the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority on an appointment or event basis rather than into a roll-off. Paint, solvents, fuels and pool chemicals stay out of our boxes. What we haul goes into the RVRA system and leaves the Tinker Creek Transfer Station by Norfolk Southern rail for the 33-mile trip to Smith Gap. The City of Roanoke will not collect construction and demolition debris under Chapter 14.1, and it will not take homeowner-generated remodeling material either, so gut-out debris is a container job from the start. Before any digging or demolition, call Virginia 811, still known here as Miss Utility. Va. Code section 56-265.19 A requires notice of not less than 48 hours nor more than 12 working days, and demolition is expressly covered. Frost depth in the City of Roanoke is 18 inches. For weight guidance on a wet cleanout, read our Roanoke flood and storm cleanup notes.

• Regionthe City of Roanoke
• Distance from our yard4 miles south of our Peters Creek Road yard
• Main routesPeters Creek Road south to Shenandoah Avenue, then Main Street south over the Wasena bridge
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

The usual approach is Peters Creek Road south to Shenandoah Avenue and then Main Street south over the Wasena bridge, which drops a truck straight into the neighborhood. Memorial Avenue east from Grandin Road serves the western half, and Winchester and Sherwood Avenues take us up to the streets above the park. Wiley Drive runs along the river for anything on the greenway side, though we watch it closely after heavy rain. When the surface streets are slow we use I-581 to Elm Avenue and cross the river from the east. Wasena driveways are generally workable, so most of what we need to know is about the drive rather than the street: width at the narrowest point, surface, slope, and what is overhead. If the job is flood or water damage, tell us that on the first call. It changes the size we bring, because saturated material weighs roughly twice what people estimate and we would rather bring two smaller boxes than one that cannot legally leave.

Routes we run: Peters Creek Road south to Shenandoah Avenue, then Main Street south over the Wasena bridge, Memorial Avenue east from Grandin Road for the western half of the neighborhood, I-581 south to Elm Avenue, then west and south across the river, Winchester Avenue and Sherwood Avenue for the streets above the park, Wiley Drive along the river for anything on the greenway side.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Wasena

Start with the question nobody has to ask in a normal county: which government are you standing in. The Roanoke Valley runs four of them at once. The City of Roanoke is an independent city and is not part of Roanoke County. Salem is a second independent city. Vinton is a town, and the town is in the county. Roanoke County keeps its own courthouse at 305 E. Main St in Salem, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the lines here were drawn. Virginia is also a Dillon Rule state, so a locality holds “only those powers which are expressly granted” — no office in this valley can invent a container rule the General Assembly never enabled, and none of the four has to answer the same way its neighbor does. Work out which one covers the address in Wasena before you plan anything in the street, because the street is where the answers split. In the City of Roanoke the pavement is the City’s, and a container in it needs the City of Roanoke Dumpster/Portable Storage Container Permit, issued by the Transportation Division of Public Works under City Code §§ 14.1-41 through 14.1-46 and § 30-2. The numbers are worth carrying in your head: 30 consecutive days maximum for a dumpster, 7 days for a portable storage container, the application in at least 10 calendar days ahead of placement, and a certificate of public liability insurance of at least $1 million per occurrence naming the City of Roanoke as an additional insured. Placement is 30 feet clear of stop signs, stop bars, crosswalks and intersections, 5 feet clear of driveways, never blocking a walkway or a fire hydrant, with a 10-foot travel lane kept open and “traffic cones and reflective tape in place at all times.” Company contact information goes on at least two sides, and the applicant notifies the adjacent businesses and residences. The City does not publish the fee, so ask the Transportation Division for the current amount rather than trusting a number off a web page, ours included. In Roanoke County the pavement out front is usually not the county’s at all. Under the Byrd Road Act of February 1932, VDOT maintains the secondary roads — only Arlington and Henrico opted out, and only five states run their roads this way — so a street placement out there is a VDOT question, and the call goes to the VDOT Salem District before you plan it. We will not tell you there is a VDOT dumpster permit, because 24VAC30-151-30 does not list one. What the regulation does say, at 24VAC30-151-50, is that objects placed in the right-of-way in violation of the rules must be removed within 10 calendar days of receipt of notice from VDOT, and immediately, at the owner’s expense, if they are an immediate safety risk. Salem runs its own arrangements and Vinton runs a fourth; call the town or the city directly. On your own driveway, none of that applies, which is why the driveway is nearly always the right answer in Wasena. The driveway carries one rule of its own and it is a fire rule. Virginia is on the Statewide Fire Prevention Code at 13VAC5-51, which adopts the 2021 International Fire Code, and § 304.3.3 sets the trigger at 1.5 cubic yards and the clearance at five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines. Every roll-off we own is over that threshold, so five feet is simply how we set them: off the siding, off the soffit line, clear of doors, windows, exits, fire apparatus access and hydrants, and no flammable or combustible liquids in the box. There is no state fire permit for an individual container. Last, the approach. To swing a box off the rails we want about 60 feet of straight, roughly 10.5 feet of width and 20-plus feet of clear overhead. What fails that test in Wasena is almost never the ground. It is the mature tree canopy with the electrical service drop running underneath it — a spot that looks wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk out and look up before you call, and tell us what you see.

Two more layers reach every job we run, and both come from Richmond rather than from a local counter. The first is what may legally go in the box. Virginia’s solid waste regulation is 9VAC20-81, administered by Virginia DEQ, and it regulates facilities rather than materials — there is no long banned-items list here to memorize, whatever other dumpster pages tell you. The one real statewide disposal ban is lead-acid batteries, Va. Code § 10.1-1425.1, where each battery is a separate violation. Waste tires run on a threshold rule rather than a flat ban. Beyond that, be careful what you read on other dumpster pages: there is no electronics disposal ban in Virginia, and the Computer Recovery and Recycling Act is a manufacturer take-back law rather than a landfill prohibition. Leftover paint has no producer-funded drop-off program in this state either, so it has to be dealt with the hard way. None of that makes everything welcome in our containers. Paint, solvents, fuel, automotive fluids, batteries and pool chemicals stay out and take the household hazardous waste route instead. Asbestos is the hard stop. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Virginia an asbestos project runs through a DPOR-licensed contractor with DOLI notification, and the waste goes to a facility permitted to take it under 9VAC20-81. Three agencies: licensing at DPOR, notification and permits at DOLI, disposal at DEQ. Two dates decide whether that lands on your job before a building permit is even issued. Under Va. Code § 36-99.7 a locality may not issue a building permit for renovation or demolition of a building whose initial building permit predates 1 January 1985 without a licensed asbestos inspection, and the exemption is narrow and specific: residential buildings of four units or fewer are exempt unless the work is for commercial or public development. Read that twice before assuming a house is out of it. Separately, DOLI must be notified 10 working days before ANY demolition, asbestos or not. The second date is 1 January 1978, which puts a project under the federal EPA RRP rule for lead-safe work practices; in Virginia the RRP rule is EPA-administered rather than state-run, and window replacement and demolition are covered regardless of square footage. Roanoke has no local lead ordinance, so the federal rule is the whole of it. Then, before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled — and before anything is knocked down, because demolition is expressly covered — call Virginia 811 on 811. Most people here still call it Miss Utility. Va. Code § 56-265.19 A sets the window at “not less than 48 hours nor more than 12 working days,” so that call goes in the week before, not the morning of. Our permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence, and the solid waste chapter, the right-of-way permit and the collection limits are all published by the City of Roanoke and by Roanoke County.

The ground under Wasena decides most of the rest. Frost depth in this valley is published as two numbers, not one: 18 inches in the City of Roanoke, and 24 inches in Roanoke County, Vinton and Salem. Which one governs a footing depends on which locality the address sits in, which is why we name the locality every time we print the number. All four are rated SEVERE for termite infestation probability, and that rating, plus a crawlspace-heavy housing stock and humid summers, produces the signature job in this market: sill plate, band joist and subfloor replacement. Crawlspaces are common here, and plenty of older city houses have basements, so a cleanout can start below grade in either direction. Termite and rot debris is short, wet and heavy, and it is the commonest reason a container goes over payload while it still looks half full — on that work we would rather send a 10 yard twice than a 30 yard once. The rock underneath is soluble carbonate: this is Virginia’s karst belt, with caves, springs and sinkholes, and Virginia Energy puts the consequence plainly, warning that subsidence “is generally not covered by a standard homeowner’s insurance policy.” A loaded box is a concentrated point load on soil that may be bridging a void. That is a real reason to care where it goes, not a line of sales copy. The other terrain problem is slope. Between Mill Mountain, Read Mountain, Tinker Mountain, the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny ridges, a fair share of the driveways we back down are steep, curved or cut into a hillside. That changes whether a box will stay where it is set, whether the truck can get it off the rails at all, and whether the cable can pull it back up loaded. Load flat, load low. Plywood goes under every wheel and under both rails, on every placement, all year. The weather is the part outsiders get backwards in both directions. The 1991–2020 normals for station ROA, published by the National Weather Service office in Blacksburg, are 14.8 inches of snow, 42.82 inches of precipitation and a mean annual temperature of 58.1°F. It does snow here. It just does not snow enough to plan a season around: enough to shut a jobsite for a couple of days a winter, and the code agrees, with a ground snow load of 30 psf and ice barrier underlayment not required. Elevation changes that inside our service area, and the design figures from the higher ground west of the valley are not this valley’s figures. The real seasonal drivers are the remnants of tropical systems climbing the Blue Ridge, ice storms and freeze–thaw. And water. In November 1985 the Roanoke River crested at 23.35 feet against a 10-foot flood stage on 6.61 inches of rain in 24 hours, at least ten people in the valley died, and the answer was the USACE Roanoke River Flood Reduction Project. Anybody who was here remembers it, and it is why a soaked crawlspace or a flooded basement is an ordinary call for us rather than an unusual one. Where the load ends up is the local detail we like best. The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority takes the valley’s waste to the Tinker Creek Transfer Station and then moves it 33 miles by Norfolk Southern rail to the Smith Gap Landfill. In the city that built the Norfolk and Western, the garbage still goes by train. Household hazardous waste is appointment and event based through the RVRA rather than curbside, so plan around a date instead of setting it out. And the collection answers split the way everything else here splits: the City of Roanoke, under City Code Chapter 14.1, runs bulk and brush collection with limits and explicitly does not collect construction and demolition debris, while Roanoke County will take small amounts of homeowner remodeling debris with bulk collection. Salem runs a third system and Vinton a fourth. Four governments, four answers, and the line where a roll-off starts sits in a different place in each of them.

Sizes we deliver to Wasena