By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
The International Coastal Cleanup Day was held this year on September 20th. Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) volunteers celebrated the day by leading a trash cleanup in the Bolsa Chica Channel (BCC), which is on the border between Huntington Beach and Seal Beach.
The BCC is a man-made water diversion structure, meant to get water from the surrounding mountains and valleys to the ocean as quickly as possible and to prevent flooding when the big rains come.
These channels are all over southern California but are mostly hidden from view because of all the housing, parking lots, and roadways that blanket the LA basin.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing lives in those channels, but where there is water, there is life.
ODA has officially adopted a one-and-a-half mile stretch of this channel, and this was our third effort to remove debris from it for 2025. The Pacific Ocean is about a mile away. If debris is not removed from the channel, it will be washed out to the open ocean, and you can just forget about removing it.
About 10 people from ODA participated this day, with an additional 17 enthusiastic students from University California Long Beach.
Here are the folks that we were able to get the names of:
Erin Croll, Cynthia Eiland, Kelly Figueroa, Kate Gonzalez, Noel Gonzalez, Lindsay Guillon, Sophia Hernandiz, Claire Jensen, Manuel Lozano, Hannah Markel, Louie Markel (4 months old!), Jorge Martinez, Dave and Jean Merrill, Olivia Mosqueda, Tom Mullins, Kate Owens, Laura Pelligrini, Blake Storie, Lisa Taylor, Jared Tincher, and Jonathan Tran.
Two of our amazing crew: Hannah and Little Louie. Shout out for Hannah who doubles as our social media manager!
The Orange County Public Works Department controls access to this site, and ODA works with them to make sure these events are safe, effective…and fun.
Dave, Jean, Blake, and I arrived around 8:30pm, set up our tent and table. People started showing up around 9. Once I gave a short briefing about the dos and don’ts, everyone grabbed gloves, buckets, and trash grabbers.
This water channel is hemmed in on both sides by a mixture of rocks and dirt that form a kind of wall. In this specific area the walls are about 15 feet high and graded at about 45 degrees which makes it a challenge to get down to the water safely. It was so steep that we used a rope that was secured to the bumper of a truck, to rappel down.
Once everyone was safely in place, the fun (?) began. For the next 3 hours we kept filling bags with an endless stream of plastics: food wrappers, bottle caps, soda bottles, broken up pieces of plastics that were too small to easily identify.
Some of the stuff was toxic, like a 1-gallon container of motor oil (sure glad that didn’t leak its contents), several syringes, paint cans, small batteries, and a couple of propane gas tanks.
As our time there was winding down, we pulled all the debris to one spot and posed for some pictures.
It was then that we paused and saw schools of fish swimming around! Giving credence to that saying: where there is water, there is life.
We removed about 700 pounds of trash which was mostly comprised plastics out of the wildlife’s home. And from the smiles on everyone’s faces, I can tell you for certain “We’ll be back”!
If you live in Orange County, come on down and help us out next time! Email volunteer@oceandefenders.org
