Helping to clean up the harbor

Stefanie Frith

Tennis balls. A freezer door. Beer and Gatorade bottles. Oil

containers. Cigarette butts. Fishing line. Glass. Styrofoam. Meat trays.

Jack In The Box wrappers.

And the list goes on and on, said members of Junior Girl Scout Troupe

170. Seven members of the troupe were among the 230 volunteers who

participated Saturday morning in the 21st annual Clean Harbor Day in

Newport Beach.

“I think this is a good idea,” Megan Von Berg, a Newport Beach

resident, said. “It really helps. And it was fun.”

Megan, 11, added that she and her fellow Girl Scouts collected five

bags of trash.

The Newport Harbor Nautical Museum organizes the massive trash pickup

effort, which ran from 8 to 11 a.m. Marshall Steele, chairman of the

event, said he assigned certain parts of the harbor to groups like the

Newport Junior Chamber of Commerce, Fullerton and Irvine high schools,

the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.

Residents of Lido Island also cleaned up their area, and kayakers went

into the Upper Back Bay to pick up debris. The Balboa Merchants Assn.

took over the Fun Zone area and a dozen boats also went out into the

harbor to catch floating debris. Organizers said that after every good

rain, the San Diego Creek overflows and everything settles into the bay.

After everyone was done collecting trash, the volunteers gathered at

the Nautical Museum for crafts, exhibits and hot dogs. Bill Hamilton,

owner of Malarky’s Irish Pub and founder of event, started the cleanup as

a way to get the community involved in the harbor. Now he said he just

cooks up the hot dogs with the rest of his family.

“The harbor just got so dirty and messy on the waterfront, we had to

do something,” said Hamilton, a Newport Beach resident who was once the

head of the Marine Division within the Chamber of Commerce. “This is

preventative medicine. Hopefully one day we won’t have to have these

cleanups. People need to know that even if they throw trash in the street

in Irvine, it’s going to end up in the Newport Harbor.”

Steele said that thanks to efforts such as the cleanup day and

education about keeping the waters clean, the harbor is much cleaner now

than in past years. He said a few years ago, word got out that the harbor

was cleaner and fewer people were coming out for the cleanup days.

“So we started using funds for educational purposes,” Steele said. “We

want to teach that there is a history in keeping the bay clean, and we

want a history of the bay down the road.”

Steele said that the state issued grants for the cleanup day, and the

city provided the bags. Collected trash went into dumpsters next to the

museum. He added that most of the trash collected is usually too wet to

separate into recycle bins.

“I had maybe four or five people come by who hadn’t participated and

said they felt guilty that there were all these kids out there with bags

and they weren’t,” Steele said. “Hey, if they won’t participate, then we

just make them feel guilty.”

Taylor Simpkins, 10, of Troupe 170 said people should participate in

the cleanup day because she and her friends had a really good time.

“It was really fun. We got lots of bags of trash,” Taylor said. “It

shows that you shouldn’t throw trash [in the ocean or street]. The more

you cleanup, the better.”