VOLUNTEERS TIDY UP L.A. RIVER.Byline: David R. Baker Daily News Staff Writer The river bank stretching before Denis Denis, king of Portugal: see Diniz. Schure on Saturday looked like a grocery cart graveyard. About 20 of the twisted metal
Twisted Metal is the first game in the Twisted Metal vehicular combat series. carcasses lay covered in mud beside the Los Angeles River The Los Angeles River is an intermittent river flowing through Los Angeles County, California, from Canoga Park in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, 51 miles (82 km) southeast to its mouth in Long Beach. as volunteers taking part in an annual river cleanup struggled to free them. Soiled shopping bags hung from trees and bushes like plastic Spanish moss Spanish moss, fibrous grayish-green epiphyte (Tillandsia usneoides) that hangs on trees of tropical America and the Southern states, also called Florida, southern, or long moss. . ``It's endless,'' said Schure, one of the event's organizers, as he surveyed the spot near the Balboa Boulevard bridge. ``We could haul shopping carts out of here forever.'' Instead, Schure and an estimated 1,200 volunteers spent several hours Saturday trying to clean the river of debris washed in by winter rains. Organized by Friends of the Los Angeles River, the annual event also was intended to teach people about a waterway many ignore. ``It's amazing how many people drive over here and never realize there's a river,'' said Melanie Winter, managing director of the Friends. Unable to clean the river's entire 51 miles, the group concentrated its efforts Saturday on six sites from the Sepulveda Basin to Long Beach. Other volunteers picked up trash in the Tujunga Wash Tujunga Wash is a stream in Los Angeles County, California. It is a tributary of the Los Angeles River, providing about a fifth of its flow, and drains about 225 square miles. , which feeds into the river. Bands of Cub Scouts, Boeing employees and others started scouring scouring characterized by scour. scouring disease a colloquial name for secondary nutritional copper deficiency. the riverbed near Balboa Boulevard before 9 a.m., armed with work gloves and garbage bags handed out by organizers. Although filled with trash, the area could have looked worse. This winter's heavy rains, which flooded the Sepulveda Basin several times, washed much of the junk in the riverbed straight out to sea, Schure said. But plenty of trash remained. Bottles, car parts and stray bits of rope lay encased en·case tr.v. en·cased, en·cas·ing, en·cas·es To enclose in or as if in a case. en·case  ment n. in mud. Blue and white plastic bags sat impaled on palm fronds 15 feet above the river. ``We've got to ban these plastic shopping bags,'' said Cindi Hunt of Simi Valley, as her family used sticks to fish bags from the trees. By midmorning mid·morn·ing n. The middle of the morning. , the Hunts had filled maybe five trash bags with junk. ``There's just tons of it,'' Cindi Hunt said. ``You work and work and work, and there's still more.'' Nearby, five kids hauled a chunk of battered chain-link fence up the embankment, while William Teal of Pacoima rolled a car tire toward the trash bin. The day's haul also included a life-size wooden Santa Claus, a bike, a soccer ball, about half of an intact car and much underwear. Teal, 14, was amazed that people could carelessly throw out so much stuff. ``It makes me wonder, what are these people doing? What are they thinking?'' he said. For some younger volunteers, the profusion of weird junk was the event's main draw. ``You know, they like to find things,'' said Keith Carter of Van Nuys, as a dozen boys in his Cub Scout troop worked through a thicket of plants. ``Eeeuuww!'' a young voice yelled from the bushes. ``Oh. They probably found the dead cat,'' Carter said. CAPTION(S): 2 Photos PHOTO (1) San Fernando High School San Fernando High School, located in San Fernando, California, is a secondary school that is a part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school colors are black and gold. All girl teams are referred to as Lady Tigers, all boy teams simply as Tigers. students troop across the Los Angeles River during Saturday's cleanup. (2) Barbara Gaitley plucks plastic bags from the riverbank foliage. David Sprague/Daily News |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion