City garbage pickup is expected to return to normal for all Honolulu households today after a week of failing to collect trash from a number of homes from Hawaii Kai to Aliamanu, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Services said.

Environmental Services spokesman Markus Owens said one route, in the Aliamanu neighborhood, did not get serviced Friday as scheduled.

Meanwhile, all other routes that have been missed since Oct. 31 were expected to be completed Friday evening, Owens said. Refuse collection equipment operators worked overtime to catch up on the routes, although the city won’t know until the payroll period ends how much the overtime is costing the city.

Officials have not been able to provide a number of households that had trash pickup problems during the past week.

The delays in trash pickup were touched off by a shortage of refuse operators in the Solid Waste Division’s Honolulu yard, Owens said. Typically it takes 35 operators to run the Honolulu routes, but there currently are 25, he said.

As a result, an unknown number of collections were delayed by up to two days, he said.

Operations outside of urban Honolulu were not affected, Owens said.

City officials said they do not know how many homes got late pickups because they do not keep track of how many homes are serviced or not serviced along each route. Environmental Services Director Lori Kahikina said the city keeps count of the number of bins collected, but that number is skewed because some customers have multiple bins while other customers may not be putting out their bins on certain days if they are not filled.

All households along some routes may have had delayed pickups, while only a percentage of households along other routes may have been pushed back a day or two, Owens said.

Mostly gray carts were missed Thursday in the Punchbowl area and on Mott-Smith Drive. On Wednesday portions of Hawaii Kai, including Mariners Ridge and Kalama Valley were missed. On Tuesday affected neighborhoods included Kalihi, Liliha, Pauoa Valley and Pacific Heights; on Monday, Wilhelmina Rise as well as portions of Kaimuki and Palolo Valley; and Oct. 31, Niu Valley and Hawaii Loa Ridge.

The department is filling up to six positions to bolster staffing, Owens said.

Recently, bulky-item pickup across Oahu has also fallen behind schedule, but that situation is separate from the shortage in automated refuse workers, Owens said.

While property owners typically expect that bulky items could be picked up several days past scheduled dates, bulky-item crews recently fell seven to 10 days behind schedule, Owens said.

An employee shortage is partly to blame, he said. There are no workers assigned specifically to bulky-waste pickup, but a crew is selected from the pool of manually operated truck operations that service about 20,000 households islandwide.

That pool is also contending with a shortage.

The other reason is what Owens described as “an unprecedented volume of materials being set out by residents.”

In Liliha to Kalihi Valley alone, crews collected 250,000 pounds of bulky materials during a recent three-day span, which is about eight to 10 times greater than the average total weight, Owens said.