NEWBURYPORT — A dead pig, a rusted-out car door and 14 syringes, used and unused, are among the debris picked up on Plum Island's north end since a trio of record rainfall events passed through the region this spring.
As Newburyport's Department of Public Services attempts this week to clean up after what some are calling the 10th "hundred year storm" to hit the city in 14 years, the pilings, trash and construction debris littering Plum Island Point will take more than a week to clear.
Speaking from the cabin of a backhoe on the southern portion of the beach yesterday, DPS Director Brendan O'Regan said this year's island cleanup effort rivals that of the Mother's Day storm of 2006, when it took five days and the help of the National Guard to get the beach ready for visitors.
This year, with help from 20 heavy machines and 25 inmates from the Lawrence Correctional Alternative Center, O'Regan said work that began at the beach Monday may carry into next week given all the debris.
"We've taken somewhere between 50-70 truckloads of material off the beach so far and we still have more to go," said O'Regan. "We've been focused on the heavy material — the wood and construction debris. But the saltmarsh hay and smaller materials will take several more days. We won't get all of it."
As in previous stormy years, the items posing the most danger to beachgoers are from the smaller items — the kinds of items Rob and Kate Yeomans and their team of BoatCamp volunteers were out cleaning up the weekend before last.
Accompanied by 30 volunteers associated with the couple's summer camp program aboard the Erica Lee fishing boat, they picked up 1,700 items on the stretch of sand from the Plum Island playground to the fishing charter docks on the other side of the point. He and the volunteers were astonished at the number of syringes they found in a 2 1/2 hour period.
"That was pretty disturbing to see," said Rob Yeomans of the syringes, which he said were partially covered by sand. "Most of them, the plunger was pushed all the way down so we don't know what was in them. With summer coming, little kids playing on the beach could come cross these things and you could be 6 feet away laying on the sand and you don't know your kid's got this thing."
Yeomans doesn't know whether the syringes are coming from upriver and being deposited at the mouth, are medical waste, or have been used to shoot up heroin either on the banks of the river or on the beach itself.
But one thing's for sure, he said — they're spread across the beach.
Yeomans' mother and sister, upon learning of the discovery, have taken it upon themselves to walk the beach in search of similar items. They found syringes as far down as Mad Martha's, he said. And even after his group combed the sand at Plum Island Point, DPS workers are finding them at the site still.
"We found two today," O'Regan said yesterday.
Efforts to weed out syringes and pieces of glass have been complicated this year due to the fact that the city's surf rake on the fritz. Since that's the only machine able to sift out dangerous and small objects, O'Regan said there's little hope of uncovering them if they're resting under the sand as many are.
"We have a transfer request before city council to replace our surf rake," said O'Regan. "It's just inoperable right now and it will be somewhere between $20,000-$30,000 to repair."
A surf rake is a machine with steel tying and a number of steel rods that comb the sand and drag for debris.
"In doing that it pulls up anything that gets stuck in the sand," said O'Regan. "It pulls it up into a big bucket that may be 4 feet by 8 feet long, and all that stuff gets thrown onto a filter and it filters the sand out."
The cost of a new rake is approximately $50,000-$60,000, according to O'Regan, and is preferable to fixing the departments' 25-year-old machine.
"In order to get the beach in really good shape we'll need that surf rake. Without that we won't be able to get it into the kind of shape people expect to find (the beach) in."
While Boat Camp plans to return to the area on May 23 for another cleanup from 9:30 a.m. to noon, O'Regan's crew is planning to stay out at the site through at least this week. After that, he said, they plan to work their way from the beach inland, where large amounts of debris currently rests in the marshland up to Joppa Flats. O'Regan said the city has the help from the Sheriff's Department for a total of two weeks, he said.
"If we finish up early down here on the beach the plan is to move inland and get down to the Ocean Ave., Water Street area and to move in a westerly direction down to Joppa," said O'Regan. "It's all a function of how quickly we can do the beach. We have access to this help for a two week period starting yesterday."
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