Firefighters rescued a Manteca man believed to be in his late 40s from a city refuse truck shortly before 7 a.m. Tuesday after the truck driver heard him yelling over the roar of the engine and the hydraulic compressor.

Battalion Chief David Marques said the man was believed to have been sleeping in the recyclable dumpster when city crews were making their rounds picking up discarded cardboard from the alley in the 1000 block of West Yosemite Avenue.

The truck driver stopped his vehicle near the corner of El Portal and Virginia Avenues and called 911 when he heard the frantic yelling from the back of his truck that was about three-quarters full. City refuse trucks periodically compact what they collect in order to make more room as they make their collections.

Engine 242 and Truck 24 responded to the scene and put a ladder up the side of the large refuse vehicle and slid a second ladder down inside the box of the truck.  Chief Marques said Fire Captain Rob Grycel and firefighter Derek George helped the man down the ladder and had him sit on a front porch of a home at the intersection where ambulance medics checked him out for injuries.

Marques said the man’s black leather jacket, baseball cap and jeans were relatively clean for having been in the truck with its load of discarded, mostly flattened cardboard.  The chief said the man claimed to live on nearby Virginia Avenue and just walked away down the street after he had been checked out.

One area businessman who didn’t want to be identified said he has seen other men pop out of dumpsters in the early morning hours when cleaning debris in his parking lot.  He said when the refuse trucks get near the dumpsters it seems to be a last minute warning for the men sleeping inside to vacate the steel dumpster or be deposited along with the trash in the crushing haulers.

Another driver Bob Gore said he had talked to the driver who was shaken not only by the incident but by what he realized could have been the final outcome had he continued to compress his load with the truck’s hydraulic pressure system. 

Gore said he remembered two teens that were caught in a dumpster behind a store on East Yosemite Avenue near Highway 99.  He recalled that the two youths fled the dumpster in time to avoid serious injury some 10 to 15 years ago.