The City of Knoxville's 311 Call Center will cross the 6,000 call mark in a single week for only the second time in the aftermath of a pair of violent storms that dropped trees across dozens of city streets and power lines and left yards littered with debris.
The city also unveiled a new citywide, curbside recycling program and started signing people up to participate in it this week.
As of noon Friday the seven member 311 staff that works out of a small office on the sixth floor of the City County Building had answered more than 5,700 calls since Monday and expected to hit about 6,100 by the end of the day.
The all-time record for a single week was 6,355, the week after Thanksgiving in 2007.
"You've got three things, the storms, kickoff of the recycling program and a three day weekend that are driving up the number of calls," said 311 Director Russ Jensen. "We'll always be busy after a three-day weekend, especially when it's nice and people are working in their yards, but with the addition of the storms and recycling it has really added up.
The 311 system is the city's customer service center where Knoxville residents can call a single number to report a problem, request a service or get information.
The 311 agents take non-emergency calls for city departments ranging from Public Service to Parks and Recreation to Engineering and Community Service. Those calls include everything from complaints about potholes to questions about traffic tickets and youth athletic league schedules.
Service requests are submitted to the proper departments and entered into the city's tracking system – which allows both the caller and city managers to keep up with the status of the request.
Normally the most common calls are related to questions about City Court or complaints about dirty or overgrown lots.
This week many of the calls have focused on reporting storm-related problems like downed trees or large limbs across city streets or have involved questions related to the pick-up of storm debris. The 311 office has also received numerous calls from residents interested in signing up for the recycling service that kicks off in October.