Youths Turn Dump Cleanup Into Team Relay : Ojai Valley: Teen-agers pull auto parts, old furniture, rusted appliances and other trash from an illegal junk heap.

Fifty-two teen-agers plunged into the dust, rust and wreckage of an illegal roadside dump in the Ojai Valley on Friday, picked it apart and put the trash where it belonged.

Piece by piece, the clutter of dead appliances, car parts and old sofas moved up a steep hill off Santa Ana Road, passed from hand to hand by youths clinging to two 30-foot ropes.

Within three hours, they pulled two tons of scrap metal and several hundred pounds of recyclable glass and aluminum out of the Ventura River bed, where it had been accumulating for at least 20 years, and deposited it in trash bins by the road.

“With this many people, you can get a lot accomplished in a short time,” said Scott Mathes, who oversaw the cleanup as head of the California Environmental Project, a small nonprofit group devoted to cleaning up wilderness areas.

“It’s really inspiring to me to see these guys understand what is happening,” Mathes said. “When you explain to them that this material negatively affects natural areas, that gets through to them more than saying, ‘It’s ugly and we gotta clean it up.’ ”

Mathes recruited the young volunteers from Camp Ramah, a camp in Ojai for Jewish youngsters from all over the country.

Friday’s cleanup, at one of the estimated 300 illegal dumps around Ventura County, fit neatly into Camp Ramah’s lesson of “tzedakah,” or charitable acts, said camp teacher Simcha Saul.

“The kids have a lot to learn. At this age they’re very me-oriented,” Saul said as campers dug enthusiastically into the junk pile with gloved hands and shouts of encouragement. “This is part of our program of social awareness. We try to teach them giving and charity,” he said.

The lessons learned were many.

Some campers learned not to lift more than they could carry.

Angela Klein, 15, of Canoga Park and three friends carried a rusty, maroon Honda hood easily from the hilltop to the scrap-metal bin. But when she and six others tried to lug half of a Volkswagen Beetle into the bin, they had to drop it and get more help.

“I’m into this, it’s good for the environment,” said Angela once the decayed car body was in the bin.

Angela said she chose cleanup work Friday over other camp activities like theater or working with senior citizens because “I want to clean the earth. Acting is only for one night and cleaning this is forever.”

Others said they learned how ignorant people can be.

“Not a lot of people know about these, they’re everywhere,” 14-year-old Hillel Smith of Westchester said in disgust, looking around at the illegal dump. “People don’t realize people are actually doing this. They dump this crap all over and it ruins our environment.”

And many campers who stood ankle deep in dirt while passing junk up the hillside learned that they probably should have worn higher-topped shoes.

Nina Goodman, 14, of Albuquerque, N.M., flopped onto a sun-rotted sofa awaiting disposal and knocked the gravel out of her sneakers.

“It’s good to feel like you’re helping clean things up,” she said brightly, then strolled back to the line of fellow campers that stretched down the hill.

Tires, rusty box springs and bullet-riddled stove lids moved uphill through young hands.

“Nails!” cried camp counselor Mitch Blank of Los Angeles, warning those in the line above him about hazards in each piece of trash he passed along. “Muffler!” he called. “Heavy! heavy! heavy!”

The word was passed up in the line, ending when the last camper heaved the thick truck muffler into the scrap bin with a clang.

Peter Kaiser, an analyst for the county Solid Waste Management Department who witnessed the cleanup, said: “Some people use the easiest and cheapest way to get rid of this and might not know of the proper way to dispose of things.”

People should call their local governments to learn the location of suitable dump sites, he said.

Before Friday’s cleanup, county animal control workers had already removed a dozen goat heads and other animal carcasses found in the dump. And county environmental health workers had been summoned to remove four barrels of waste oil that had been tossed over the edge, Mathes said.

Mathes said he and other adult volunteers would collect serial numbers from the half a dozen junked cars--ranging from a squashed, green Volkswagen bug to a faded blue Chevrolet Caprice with shattered windshield--and report them to the Sheriff’s Department before selling the scrap.

By midafternoon Friday, the dump was visibly smaller than when the volunteers had arrived.

They had used a rope and six pairs of brawny shoulders to drag a stove up the slope, its buckshot-peppered doors flapping.

They had piled two dozen tires at the top of the hill.

And they had dug a hole in the hilltop and reinstalled a sign that some scofflaw had uprooted and thrown over the edge.

The sign read: “No Dumping . . . Penalty Up to $500.00 Fine, 6 Mos. in Jail, or Both.”

The sign planters let out a little cheer.

And Hillel stomped the earth down around the signpost and went back to the line.