Seal Beach, Long Beach cleanups on Saturday make a dent in heaps of trash left by storms
Volunteers along the Southern California coastline pitched in to help spruce up the sand on Saturday between the storms, after major rainfall in recent weeks left area beaches looking like landfills.
“That’s the beauty of this community, we all care,” said Steve Masoner, founder of Save Our Beach, a nonprofit in Seal Beach that has been hosting monthly cleanups for two decades.
The break in the storms on Saturday allowed volunteers in Long Beach to join the monthly cleanup hosted by Community Action Team at Rosie’s Dog Beach, a nonprofit founded by Justin Rudd.
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Like Seal Beach, much of the trash that flows down from the San Gabriel River ends up on the shore in Long Beach. The mouth of the river funnels runoff from 52 inland cities straight into the ocean that borders Seal Beach and Long Beach.
“The animals that live in the water and on the sand deserve a safe and clean place,” Rudd said. “And the humans that visit our coast should have a clean and safe place too, even after the rains.”
“Any trash on our beach is too much trash,” he added.
Masoner said that although a large amount of debris ends up on the coast after storms, it’s never been as bad as it was in 1996, before the regular monthly cleanups, when there was trash two feet deep on the sand from the waterline to the beachfront houses.
“I measure how much progress we’ve made,” he said, calling it “spectacular.”
Since the group started 20 years ago, an estimated 150,000 volunteers have given a helping hand, logging 340,000 volunteer hours and collecting more than 380 tons of trash.
“Each month we made another big dent in it,” he said. “It’s just heartwarming.”
Save Our Beach and Community Action Team host regular monthly cleanups every third Saturday of the month.