Record rainfall across the Northeast in July has clogged the Chesapeake Bay and its beaches with logs, debris and other trash. And it’s required a herculean effort to clean it up.
Some 50 volunteers showed up at Sandy Point State Park, just north of the Bay Bridge, over the weekend to help park rangers clear those beaches.
They fanned out across the park’s East Beach, scooping up arm loads of driftwood, plastic flower pots and other debris that had been washed ashore and tossing it into those big, yellow recycling containers.
They emptied the containers into a huge scoop on the front of a tractor that a park ranger drove along behind them. The ranger headed for a dumpster and the volunteers began scooping all over again.
Samantha Straub, a teacher at the Severn School who was there with her son, who needed to log some community service hours.
She says she wasn’t expecting as much small stuff.
"I was expecting larger chunks, like that log out there," she said, pointing to a huge tree apparently stuck in the sand just offshore. "But the amount of just like tiny plastic and sort of shredded Styrofoam as well as nature’s mess, it really makes it not pleasant to come to the beach or swim."
Her son, Tyler, was nearby raking up a pile of debris. He said he was getting in his hours and helping to clean up the park at the same time.
Jen Brienza, from Glen Burnie, said she had been in a Facebook discussion about the mess and saw somebody wondering, "What are they going to do about it?"
“And I’m talking to my daughter and I’m like well, who’s they," she said with a tone of disgust. "Who do they think they are? I mean, we’re they. So we signed up the next day for the clean-up and came down here to help."
Her daughter, Jayden Schiflet, saw it in more pragmatic terms.
"If I want to go swimming," she said, "I better get my butt out here and clean it up."
While the beach was littered with driftwood and trash, Patrick Bright, the southeastern regional manager for Maryland’s park service, says it was worse earlier in the week, like Tuesday afternoon when they started.
"There was a chicken coop; there was a shed box for blue crabs," he recalled. "And then, probably every 200 feet along the beach, there was a tree or a giant root ball that had washed presumably all the way down the bay and ended up on our shorelines."
Mauria Schafer, of Severn, had worked her way onto the stone jetty at the south end of the beach and was dumping driftwood into a large gray trash can when she stopped a few minutes to talk. She said she feels as if this is her back yard. .
"So, I’m here to make a difference and try to clean it up, clean out the waters."
She’s a teacher and she says she’s worried about the kids.
"We want a safe environment for the kids to come and swim," she explained as she scooped another handful of driftwood from the rocks. "Not everybody has a big back yard, and our environment is the back yard."
The rangers and the volunteers all expressed a sense of ownership in the park and the Chesapeake Bay.
"This is a really special event that you guys are out here for," Ranger Manny Toscana told the volunteers at a safety briefing before they started working. "This is our bay. So it something we need to take care of. So, you guys being out here, it honestly makes me feel really god about our future."
"That’s it," Susan May, from Glen Burnie, agreed. "It’s our Bay, our beach, our bay. If we don’t take care of it, who will?"
The park service’s Bright says they took between 25 and 30 dumpsters worth of trash off the beach in the first four days of the clean-up. He estimated that’s probably something like 80 to 100 tons.
But their dumpster supplier charges by the ton. So, they’ll know for sure how much trash they got rid of when they get the bill.
