3 Inches of Rain, 200 Tons of Trash

The rain gone and the sun shining again, city workers and sanitation crews fanned out Thursday on local beaches for an annual ritual -- picking up the mess.

On the shore in Newport Beach, just south of the swollen, trash-laden Santa Ana River, the results of Wednesday’s storm were impressive.

Mixed in with tangles of kelp were tennis shoes, snakes, Big Gulp cups, trashcans, bamboo trees, antenna toppers, King Cobra beer bottles, Mobil oil cans, Taco Bell hot sauce packets, paint cans, half a toilet seat and balls of every size and shape.

“This is really, really bad,” said Cliff Kjoss, a 33-year-old Seal Beach resident who stopped by to take pictures of the accumulated trash. A torn, black Super Sport Radial tire floated by as he snapped photos.

Wednesday’s storm, which dumped more than 3 inches of rain in some communities, washed debris from streets and discards from flood control channels and sent the collective mess toward the ocean.

Bill Tidwell, operations manager at the Orange County Department of Public Works, said he had 216 employees and about 100 inmates from Orange County Jail cleaning flood control channels throughout the county Thursday to lessen the amount of debris that would reach the beach.

The Santa Ana River, which drains 2,450 square miles of land, is one of Orange County’s most powerful conveyors of debris -- particularly after the season’s first significant storm.

“You don’t want to be around this stuff,” said Phil O’Brien, an equipment operator for Newport Beach. “It’s a lot of old, rotten stuff.”

For 29 years, O’Brien has loaded countless items, including shopping carts and car bumpers, into his blue-and-yellow dump truck after the first big storm of the year, all in the name of keeping Newport Beach clean.

Beginning at 14th Street, cleaning crews on Thursday worked their way north along the shoreline, gathering trash. It was then dumped into the truck, which O’Brien emptied in a heap near the river’s mouth. From there, it was trucked to a county landfill.

O’Brien said more than 200 tons of debris was collected -- roughly the weight of 10 Orange County Transportation Authority buses.

“That’s only a drop in the bucket,” he said. “We work so hard to take care of this place. We had it so pretty, so shining. All of a sudden, the storm hits and it looks like a mess.”

O’Brien and his crew perform cleanups like Thursday’s after every significant storm.

Although the load that floated onto Newport Beach’s sands Wednesday and Thursday was staggering, O’Brien said it was much worse during El Nino storms in the late 1990s.

“You get used to it,” he said. “Pretty soon, we’ll have a pretty beach back.”

The muck attracted plenty of onlookers.

Gerry Bourke, 52, and his wife, Sharon, 47 -- vacationing from Murray, Utah -- found a certain fascination in the mess.

“We wanted to come down her to see what the Santa Ana River is putting out,” said Gerry Bourke, an environmental health scientist. “We hear it’s pretty polluted.”

He was right. The beach was strewn with trash, the ocean was muddy, and waves the color of Ovaltine slapped the shore.

Bourke said he was hoping to enjoy some surfing during his vacation but said his wife won’t let him near the water.

“It looks like chocolate milk out there, and it smells pretty bad,” she said, as packets of instant noodles and cans of spray paint bobbed in the water. “It’s sad to see what humans have done to a nice place.”

But someone’s trash is often someone else’s treasure.

“Some of these glasses make beautiful jewelry pieces,” said Patrick Sullivan, 59, a jeweler from Newport Beach who paced slowly, the wind blowing against his face, as he kept his eyes on the wet sand and mud to avoid broken seashells, dead birds and beer bottles.

He found a broken piece of gold-colored glass. After inspecting it, he concluded it would make a nice piece of jewelry.

Times staff writer H.G. Reza contributed to this report.