Dozens engage in beach cleanup effort

The black boot looked sturdy enough to wear as Dave Drader fished it out of his plastic trash bag. A few threads had been jarred loose and plenty of sand particles dotted the surface, but the overall condition — plus the lack of a second boot nearby — hinted at an unintentional journey down the storm drain.

“Isn’t that weird?” Drader said, examining the boot near the spot by the Santa Ana River jetties where he discovered it. “That’s a designer boot. That’s probably a $240 boot.”

Then, imagining the boot’s former owner, he added, “He’s not going to be real happy. Or she.”

Drader, who lives in Canada and rents in Orange County every winter, was among dozens of people who gathered Saturday morning to clean debris from the shore in and around Newport Beach. The group, spearheaded by Dory Deli and including members of local environmental organizations, gathered at the deli at 9 a.m. to stock up on plastic bags and gloves.

Afterward, the volunteers traveled by car to different parts of the coastline to remove at least some of the leavings of last week’s rains. Beginning in earnest Tuesday, El Niño storms hammered Southern California, dropping 2 1/2 inches of rain in four days in downtown Los Angeles this week, according to the National Weather Service.

With that rain comes plenty of currents, as storm drains swallow debris for miles north. And with that debris can come stories — even if they’re only matters of speculation.

Did these dozens of spray-paint cans belong to teenage taggers who tossed them into the gutter to avoid detection by police? How many cars did it take to dislodge this raised pavement marker that wound up amid tennis balls and plastic bottles? And who owned that boot, anyway?

“The graffiti artists do their thing, and it’s not here by the river,” said Darrel Ferguson, vice chair of the Surfrider Foundation, who noted that he had personally come to the beach Thursday and removed more than 100 spray cans. “It’s in the neighborhood where the storm drains run down to the Santa Ana River.”

Ferguson’s nonprofit had scheduled a beach cleanup of its own Saturday morning, but it quickly allied with the Dory Deli group and even shared materials. The latter group, which included members of We Are Ocean and the ECO-Warrior Foundation along with individual volunteers, spent three hours Saturday morning filling bags for the Dumpster.

Among the participants was City Councilman Tony Petros, who represents West Newport and frequently swims in the ocean.

“These are our beaches,” he said. “They deserve to be cared for and looked after.”

The cleanup ended around noon, with crews covering the area from the Newport Pier to the Huntington Beach border, plus some spots farther to the south. Afterward, Mike Glenn, founder of the blog Save Newport, was left doing math in his head.

In all, he said, more than 200 people had joined in the cleanup, meeting outside Dory Deli at 9 a.m. Glenn added that he and four other people had worked together to gather 100 pounds of trash, which amounted to 20 pounds per person.

“If everyone else did half of that, then we removed over a ton of garbage from the beach,” he surmised.