By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
See Lee - in the middle in black tshirt - on
a January 2026 cleanupA team of engineers and technicians stepped up, big time!
Back in June of last year a new volunteer participated with us for the first time on a cleanup at the Bolsa Chica Channel. His name is Lee O’Donnell, and he found out about the Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) channel cleanup event through Facebook. Until that moment he had never heard of us.
He was so enthralled by making such a tangible difference that he told his colleagues at Mercedes Benz about ODA and approached the management team to see if they would let some of their team take a half day off and go out on one of these cleanups.
They were all aboard with the prospect!
Debris along bank -- the birds have to live with this! (That is, until ODA comes along)...
Fast forward to this past Wednesday, July 15th, and this time we not only had 14 of their employees meet us at the channel, they brought along 2 step vans that the company allowed them to use. This was really helpful because the area we were focusing on for this event was hard to access and having as few vehicles as possible allowed us to better manage all the volunteers but also cut down on all the dust that gets kicked up when vehicles drive over the pebbly road.
This is what the banks look like before the hard-working volunteers get to it!
In addition to the Mercedes team, we had 9 people from ODA show up as well. So, there were 23 dedicated people out, during the middle of the week, all primed to get into the weeds and clean this place up before any storms turn this placid waterway into a raging river sweeping trash and debris of all kinds out to the ocean.
This channel funnels all the detritus that find its way into the streets, gutters, and storm drains from the mountains that surround Los Angeles and Orange counties, and the channels run all the way out to the sea. Something like 5,000 square miles.
When the rains finally do come, and they always do even if infrequently, it all washes into the ocean eventually. Our goal with each cleanup we do is remove as much as we can by hand, before it gets lost to the depths of the oceans and out of the realistic possibility to stop it from killing untold millions of animals that had nothing to do with creating this problem.
I drove around the area the day before, trying to locate areas where we’d be most impactful with our limited time. While driving around I didn’t see many birds, but the ones I did see made me more resolute to help them in any way I can.
While I spotted several year-round resident species, like the common terns, long-billed curlew, snowy egrets, and some turkey vultures soaring overhead.
I spotted a species I had never seen on this coast before, the white-faced ibis. There were 2 sets of adults with about a dozen young ones close by. Always a welcome sight when I get to add a new species to my list, and their iridescent feathers were beautiful!
Into the weeds and earthen banks we head!
We met up at 9am on a hot and scorching day. After lathering ourselves up with sunscreen, we grabbed our buckets, trash bags, and grabbers. Then got into the vans and trucks and drove about a mile up the channel where we went to work.
This section of the channel is one that we have never worked on before, and as you can see it needed some serious attention. We spent the next 3 hours with our heads down and pulling all manner of plastics that are part of our throw-away society.
Around noon we called it quits, moved all the trash bags we had filled and moved it all to one location where we took some pictures of the crew with our “Catch of the Day.”
When you see all these bags lined up it’s easy to just gloss over what’s inside them. So, we emptied 4 of them onto a tarp so you can get an understanding of what would be heading for the open without the effort of these volunteers.
Check out the video of our haul:
Pretty disgusting, but it feels great knowing that it will all be headed to a landfill and out of harm’s way.
I didn’t get the names of everyone that attended, but here are most of the folks. If you were here with us and your name isn’t listed, please have Lee pass your name along to me and we’ll update this page!
The dedicated channel cleaners were: Dennis Arp, Ganeshraj Balamuragan, Austin Frock, Hemanth Kappanna, Francisco Lopez, Shankar Mahesh, Dave Merrill, Kent Morris, Linda Nicholes, Sai Nischal, Lee O’Donnell, Laura Peligrini, Jugal Kishore Ruvva, and Darlene Summers.
It was an incredible haul, almost 1,120 pounds.
Thanks everyone for making a HUGE difference for the oceans, the wildlife, and their wetlands habitat!
If you work for a company in Southern California and you like what Mercedez Benz did (and Cox Communications before them), please contact us by email and we'll set something up!
