By Norb Garrett
San Clemente Times
San Clemente resident Anne Webber called me in the middle of her run along Poche Beach last Wednesday with a simple plea, “Bring some trash bags down here; it’s bad,” she said. The day after the area’s first major rainfall yielded a sight almost impossible to believe. Strewn along the beach both north and south of the Poche outfall was a summer’s worth of trash collected in the drainage system.
Seemingly thousands of tennis balls, plastic bottles, aerosol cans and Styrofoam products littered the beach and outfall. A dead sea bird sat amongst the trash, as did a baby rattlesnake that luckily I poked at with a stick rather than assumed it was dead (oh yeah, it was a rattler—saw the little shakers at the end of the tail and all).
The trash piles sat next to the new multi-million dollar filtration system at Poche, obviously incapable of handling such a deluge. That system is part of a solution, yes, but more must be done to contain the trash and keep it from reaching the sea. If we can put a man on the moon, we can figure out how to keep tennis balls and rattlesnakes from reaching the ocean.
What's up with that "multi-million dollar filtration system at Poche??" The system appears to never be in operation. Meanwhile, Poche continues to get an "F" rating. What's the point of spending all that money if the system is never working and we still have the filthiest water?
Posted by: Kevin Paugh | 10/22/2009 at 03:08 PM
Kevin: Great question and one we are looking in to...hope to get some answers here shortly from the county...
Posted by: Norb | 11/04/2009 at 09:40 PM
That system is part of a solution, yes, but more must be done to contain the trash and keep it from reaching the sea
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