Hovering Dump

[zebulon_stonehenge 135]

Check out the two attached photos. In the photo 1, we see a nice tranquil suburban R1 subdivision. But wait, what's that hovering in the middle? In photo 2, we get a closer look: it's a piece of a fractured garbage dump, floating over a bus stop! It seems to be hovering at an altitude of about 20 feet.

This is in my second-oldest SC4 city, "Nuketown", a "medium", which I think I started working on back in 2005 or thereabouts. The garbage dump got broken, and I had about 5 pieces of broken dump with no road connections which I'd been unable to get rid of for the last 14 years (in real time) or 127 years (game time). Until tonight. Using various mods & tricks, I was able to get rid of all my dumps except for one, a two-square "floater" hovering 20 feet in the air. I think it's because I "Leveled" the area, and while most of the dump chunks moved with the leveling, this piece didn't, so now it's 20 feet higher than its surroundings.

Oddly, even with road connections, the "garbage capacity" graph shows 0 (I'm exporting all the garbage to the city to the south), meaning the SC4 program doesn't know the dump is there. So it's a ghost dump. I tried the landfill eraser mod, zoning more dump next to it then unzoning, terraforming, immortal-lot killers, etc, but the hovering dump chunk persists.

The sims don't seem to mind it, though; they cheerfully built homes all around it, though the houses right next to it appear to be redneck shacks rather than frump palaces; not all sims like garbage heaps in their backyards.

Anyone have any ideas on how to get rid of it (save obliterating the city)? Or is this going to be here for the long haul?

  Edited October 18, 2019 by zebulon_stonehenge  
Fixed typo; clarified trash export.

[Cyclone Boom 16,847]

As an observation, I notice how the hovering dump is directly beside the road top bus stop. Maybe this could somehow be the cause I wonder.

My first thought (as was probably yours) is this could be a case of what's known as the Immortal Lot Syndrome.

This is often caused by how a building or prop is larger than the lot size itself, and then it overflows the boundaries. If so, the good news is the name of this problem isn't as doom and gloom as it may imply. You say about trying "immortal-lot killers" though, so I'm not too sure whether it could be the case or not. I'll just post this anyway though until anyone more knowledgeable on the issue might have more of an idea what it might be.

You may have seen...

There's an overview posted here by RJ, then the Immortality Killer which intentionally has an overhanging building (digger) which deals with it.

Before doing anything further, I recommend making a full backup of your region so it could always be revered back to the current state.

Another possibility I wonder is to try bulldozing by de-zoning the surrounding area. Then speed up the simulation to Cheetah for a while, zoom and rotate the camera view around (which might reset what is visible). Next save the tile using Ctrl+S and then quit the game and reload your Nuketown tile.

[Prophet42 1,500]

In addition to Cyclone Boom's last suggestion of dezoning and bulldozing around the floating dump, I would also suggest you raise the land underneath to match the dump height.  This may also be something in the simulator to either get rid of the overhang (if that is the issue) or to actually "recognize" the garbage and start decaying it.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

[Nobo 25]

I have a similar problem, just to mention it.

After my Policemen or Firemen are required to attent an accident or a fire, they all but one return to their stations. It doesn't worry me too much as only the respective index pointer (#1) keeps showing in my city. But these "gost"-officers should be able to get their coffee or tea and take a break as the next alarm is coming soon, my city has over 200k inhabitants and a lot is happening every day.  

Your gost garbage is more serious, the suggestions given to solve this sound like the solution.