July 2015 Cleanup Results

July’s Cleanup Nets Big Soggy Mattress and More

by Deb Kramer

Beautiful gravel-bottom creek bed. Photo by Deb Kramer.

On July 18th, we hosted a Coyote Creek cleanup at our Wool Creek Dr location, behind Shirikawa Elementary School. An intrepid 33 volunteers removed an impressive 2.1 tons of trash. Now, this spot is getting nearly spotless. One returning volunteer couldn’t believe how clean it was since the last time we were there. That is great news!

Due to the lack of water in this creek (which is good and bad), we were able to really get into the dry creek bed, filled with nice gravel and river rock, to pick out some of the large items (shopping carts, a tire, and a soggy mattress) and smaller items, such as the styrofoam and bits of plastic around a huge log jam.

An illegal dump of marble occurred in the past few days, and these guys dug right in. Thanks Vitaly, Sammy, and Eric. Photo by Deb Kramer.

One of the sad things to see is that people are still illegally dumping materials here. This time, we had a heavy, large pile of marble and other building materials.

The Sierra Club’s Loma Prieta Chapter and Guadalupe Regional Group came out to help us with staffing and cleaning. So glad to have them as a partner. Thanks for your continued support Katja and so glad you could join us Ralph.

Team UVAN is in full swing removing several bags of trash from a large pile. Photo by Deb Kramer

And, the UVAN team also joined us again. Did you know that some of these hardworking folks are over 75 years old? We are so happy to have you all participate.

We collected the following items:

• 75 bags of trash

• 5 shopping carts

• 1 soggy mattress

• Many buckets

• 1 tire

• 1 sewer pipe section

We even found a crawdad when unearthing the mattress. It’s amazing what is in the creek.

See all the photos on our Facebook page. Be sure to Like it as well!

Join us at our August cleanups.