By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
This has been THE craziest end of summer I ever remember! Starting towards the end of August we had sweltering heat for a couple of weeks, then we got slammed with a rainstorm that drenched all of southern California. The rain coincided with high tides.
That rain flushed all the garbage that had been accumulating on our streets, lawns, culverts and parking lots, and like magic it was out of sight.
But we knew better, and 14 volunteers showed up on another blistering hot and humid day to give it our all to remove what we could from the banks of the Bolsa Chica Channel (BCC).
The BCC is our adopted channel – which we did officially through Orange County. We have another channel in Fullerton.
We met up at 9am on Saturday, September 12th. Volunteers for this outing were: Lizette Ashcraft, Alex Diaz, Natalie Fortune, Kat Isley, Michaela Jimenez, Barb Ketchum, Hannah Markel, Dave Merrill, Kent Morris, Linda Nicholes, Laura Pellegrini, and Jonathan Strange.
Most of the folks this day had never volunteered with ODA before, and it was just great to see so many new faces!
After giving a short orientation about the does and don’ts of removing the refuse due to human neglect, we broke up into a few groups and got to work.
This was our third time cleaning up this channel this year, and it showed when I got there the day before and evaluated where the majority of trash was and how easy/difficult it was going to be to get it out of the channel safely.
While I was searching for the most debris-laden areas, I saw a lot of beautiful birds which I'll share with you here. They deserve a clean home (habitat)!
The south side of the waterway was debris-free, due to our earlier efforts. Yeah!
The north side of the waterway was a different story. Almost the entire length of it was filthy with (mostly) plastics. This stretch along Edinger Blvd is about a mile long, and we worked for the next two and a half hours with our noses down, putting the trash grabbers to work.
It was great getting to know some of the newcomers. Several were students at UC Long Beach. One couple even came all the way from Murietta. That’s something like 70 miles away!
By 10:30 the heat was slowing us down, it was about 90 degrees by then, with nary a cloud in the sky. A few people left due to the weather.
Around 11, we had cleaned up about three-fourths of that one-mile stretch. I went to the far end to see if I could put a dent in a 200-yard section that was just inundated with plastics. I worked the area for about 30 minutes and was only able to cover something like 40 feet and my bag weighed at least 50 pounds.
But the heat was getting worse, so we decided to call it a day.
We removed about 625 pounds of this debris that was headed for the oceans. You can see we had 13 large trash bags full! You can bet we’ll be back shortly to finish (?) this seemingly never-ending task. Stay tuned to our calendar and come out with us next time!
Thanks everyone for giving up part of your weekend to make this waterway safer for all our feathered and finned friends!
