Storm Debris Turns Beach Into a Dump

As Mother Nature turned on the faucet, L.A. washed its hands. And the dirt--all 6,500 tons of it--went down the drain.

That was the view Wednesday from the bottom of that drain, a Long Beach shoreline at the mouth of the Los Angeles River.

Trash flushed from a network of about 100,000 upstream storm drains and carried into the river by this month’s rains has swept ashore, covering a four-mile section of beach with hunks of shopping carts, street barricade sawhorses, plastic bottles, tennis shoes, scraps of wood, foam coffee cups, dead animals and automobile parts.

Workers who go out at low tide each day and rake the debris into eight-foot-high piles say twice as much garbage has washed ashore so far this month than during all of last year.

“Looking at this tells me somebody needs to get out up there and clean up L.A.,” shrugged James Smith, a Long Beach city worker who was dragging chunks of jagged lumber, an old tire and the battered remnants of a plastic ice chest away from the waterline with a tractor.

Long Beach residents complain that they get trashed every time it rains. But they say this month’s deluge--11.66 inches at the Los Angeles Civic Center--has sent a particularly heavy cascade of castoffs their way.

A blue velvet ottoman lies half-buried in one of the 50 huge mounds of debris along the beach at the end of Junipero Avenue. A soggy red ski jacket, plastic motor oil containers and a dented water jug with the word conserve written on it are piled nearby. Most of the trash has washed up east of the downtown/Queen Mary area.

Long Beach resident Jeff Mayo, 21, poked gingerly through the pile before pulling out a cigarette lighter. He wiped the mud off, pronounced it usable and shoved it into his pocket.

“I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen it like this,” Mayo said, gazing at trash covering the beach as far as he could see.

Long Beach officials said it will probably take three months to clean up the mess--and that’s if no more garbage washes down the river. This year’s river flow has been powerful enough to deposit parts of automobile engines and kitchen appliances on the shoreline, they said.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” said Phil Hester, manager of parks for the city’s Parks, Recreation and Marine Department. He has assigned 12 workers to remove the trash and has scheduled a public beach cleanup Jan. 30, which he hopes will attract 900 volunteers.

“We’d rather see it wash out to sea,” he added. “But most of the stuff gets hung up inside the breakwater here. It settles on the breakwater rocks, then the tide lifts it up and takes it into our beaches.”

Hester said Long Beach has asked Los Angeles County to help pay for the trash removal.

County supervisors will decide Tuesday whether to allocate $250,000 for the cleanup. They’ll also be asked to kick in another $130,000 for debris-skimming equipment to be used at Long Beach marinas, said Donna Guyovich, a spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Public Works.

“Conditions and winds cause debris to collect in that one area. It’s kind of unique,” Guyovich said.

The Los Angeles River carries storm runoff for most of Los Angeles, including the downtown and San Fernando Valley areas and such cites as Glendale and Burbank. Other major drainage channels include the Eastside’s San Gabriel River and Ballona Creek on the west.

The outlets are fed by 4,050 miles of smaller storm channels that are connected to 98,000 curbside drain openings throughout the county.

Those openings are called catch basins. And they really catch it too, said Hubert Salary, manager of Los Angeles’ Wastewater Collection Division.

“Some people use them as trash cans,” he complained Wednesday. “People throw out their garbage in some of the basins. They stuff their plastic garbage bags from home in there.

“A catch basin is designed to catch small debris, not cans and plastic, refuse tops, bundles of paper, oil cans and stuff like that.”

Some newcomers to Los Angeles use street drains for garbage disposal because they are used to doing that in some foreign countries, Salary said. “We’re trying to educate them.”

Both the city and the county try to clean all the catch basins before each year’s rainy season. The city owns eight large vacuum trucks that suck trash out of the street drains; the county contracts the job out to a private firm.

Officials said plastic debris can clog the vacuums, however. That means workers have the distasteful task of lowering themselves into the street drains and shoveling the garbage out by hand.

It’s distasteful and dangerous, as the beach trash shows.

“You see a lot of hospital goods that have washed up,” explained Mike Harris, a 34-year-old unemployed Long Beach construction worker who was cautiously picking his way between the trash mounds.

“There are all kinds of syringes. I found one full of blood. I gave it to a lifeguard.”