By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
It’s been a whirlwind of activities here at the ODA headquarters, hope you’ve been paying attention!
As the old adage states, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. We’ve had rains (yeah!), high winds and monster waves all month here in California, but that hasn’t impeded our efforts to clean up the oceans, rivers, and streams.
Even though Southern California hardly has any natural rivers/streams anymore, they’ve all been “channelized” in a misguided effort to reduce flooding. However, the water all runs downhill to the oceans one way or another.
As you know, ODA has been doing monthly cleanups at a large wetland inside a military base in Los Angeles County. The wetlands are called the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR). These wetlands are a crucial habitat for migrating birds and fish.
Just outside of the Refuge there’s a concrete channel that funnels stormwater runoff from the metropolis of Los Angeles and Orange counties. This means all manners of human detritus gets flushed out to sea along with that water.
Knowing that all that water runs by the SBNWR just before it heads out to sea, I wanted to see if we could start removing all the plastics, cans, balls, stuffed animals (!), and Styrofoam from the channel.
So, I contacted the people at the Orange County Public Works (OCPW) to see what it would take for us to get permission to access this channel.
Here's what the channel looks like...and you can see why it needs our help:
It took a couple of months to get all the proper paperwork and in-person meetings for everyone to feel comfortable to give us the go-ahead. In mid-March, I finally got the approval we’ve been waiting for!
So, 22 ODA volunteers showed up on Saturday, March 22nd, at 9am and started our first cleanup of what we will now call the Bolsa Chica Channel (BCC) project.
It was GREAT to see so many people willing to give up part of their weekend to get down and dirty. Two people were especially instrumental in promoting the event which led to this large turnout.
Dave Merrill has been volunteering with ODA for about 10 years, and he also volunteers at the Aquarium of the Pacific. He told several people there about the cleanup and quite a few of them showed up.
Dennis Arp has been attending our SBNWR cleanups for about a year, and he also is involved with another nonprofit called Citizen’s Climate Lobby. Dennis lured some folks from that org to come out with us as well.
I drove down from my house in Ventura the day before to look over the site and see where we could be most effective. I went inside the SBNWR around dusk on Friday and checked out what birds happened to be stopping by on their way to their breeding grounds and saw some really cool birds. One species I hadn’t seen in years was the Northern shoveler. Such a beauty!
Another unusual sighting was a snowy egret in full breeding plumage, strutting his stuff. I also spotted dozens of willets hanging out in the shallow ponds.
I had to tear my attention away from these beautiful birds, back to the debris situation before the sun would set on me!
What is easily observable is these wetlands receive a lot of the trash that flows out of the BCC, which runs right along the border to the SBNWR. That fence you see in this picture is one of the things that prevents the lighter plastics from being blown into the refuge by high winds.
Day of the Inaugural Cleanup at BCC
Dave and Jean Merrill met me at 8:30am so we could set up our pop-up tent and get all the gear we’d need in place. Folks started showing up right on time at 9.
After signing the waivers, everyone grabbed their gloves and gear and headed down to the water’s edge where they listened to my orientation.
The volunteers on this day were: Dennis Arp, Mario and Iggy Chavez, Jessamine Hernandez, Greg Kaganovsky, Mikayla Kaini, Tessa and Abigail Klarin, Hannah and Peter Markel, Jean and Dave Merrill, Kent Morris, Tom Murray, Monica Sena, Lisa Stumph, Ethan Thour, Steve Tyler, and Bradley Whitman.
It was a beautiful day, not that anyone could tell, we were all so focused on the trash. And oh my, was there a LOT of it!
For the next 3 hours people just kept picking and plucking stuff out of the water, the bushes, and the dirt bank. I’d say we covered about 250 yards of the south side of the channel. Mind you, this stretch of the channel is about a mile long.
Here's a great example of the difference the volunteers made:
As we were wrapping up, we hauled all the trash bags we’d collected and put them in one spot where we got a group photo. Some people had to leave early, so not everyone is in this shot.
ODA Crew with their "Catch of the Day"!
Check out the giant stuffed bear. I wasn't kidding about removing stuffed animals!
I estimate that we pulled out 1,670 pounds of stuff! Mostly, but not all, plastics which means it’s a lot (because plastic is so light weight).
It was a great feeling to be with so many like-minded people, and the reward was knowing that over three-quarters of a ton of stuff will NOT be heading to the oceans.
Here's another before-and-after comparison of the great work the Ocean Defender cleanup crew did:
We’ll be back again next month, on April 26th. I hope some of you can make it! And if you're just seeing this and want to be part of this worthwhile effort please send us an email and we'll let you know when's the next cleanup event!
