Cleaning up after the deluge

When it rains, Lennie Arkinstall scrambles to stanch the outflow of urban debris churning along the Long Beach area’s swollen rivers and channels.

It’s a routine task for Arkinstall, who last week was out in blustery weather resetting yellow trash-catching booms used to corral tons of lawn clippings, toys, plastic bottles, sofas and tens of thousands of cigarette butts.

“There is usually a delayed effect: Urban runoff tends to hit local shores about four to five hours after a good rain,” he said while patrolling the area’s coastal wetlands in a white pickup truck with a twirling yellow light on top.

It didn’t take long for him to discover flaws in downtown rubbish control systems. At a small estuary known as Golden Shore Marine Reserve, a floating tree had rammed a chain-link fence, ripping a gaping hole in the mesh. A few blocks away at the Rainbow Harbor tourist complex, one end of a boom sagged beneath the surface of the water.

“I’m going to have to get down there and fix those things,” he said, peering through binoculars from a pier just a stone’s throw from the Queen Mary. “After the last big rain we had, I collected 20,000 pounds of debris at Los Cerritos Wetlands alone.”

Occasionally there are surprises in all that trash. “A few days ago, I noticed something glittering in the water at Rainbow Harbor,” he said. “I scooped it up with my dip net. It was a bunch of jewelry -- mostly watches and gold and silver rings with opals and tiny diamonds mounted on them.”

Arkinstall is paid by the city to clean up nine coastal sites and parks. Separately, federal biologists and local officials have credited his volunteer work for making east Long Beach’s Los Cerritos Wetlands an environmental showcase.

“I love this. I’m blessed,” he said. “It keeps me brainstorming all the time to come up with inexpensive and innovative ways to deal with the problem.”

-- Louis Sagahun