Beaches in Delaware hit by wave of trash - Houston Chronicle

SLAUGHTER BEACH, Del. (AP) — After Saturday's coastal cleanup, Bill McSpadden, the Slaughter Beach coordinator, was feeling pretty good.

Gone were the cigarette butts, the candy wrappers and the fragments of plastic cups.

The beach was as clean as it gets.

Then came Sunday morning.

"It was like a bad dream," he said.

When McSpadden and his wife, Shawna, walked out to the beach, they were shocked to find it covered — literally covered — with debris: bottles, cans, a toy Mickey Mouse, floating golf balls and thousands upon thousands of pieces of plastic, from black hunks of garbage cans to tiny fragments.

Then a neighbor called to say she'd found a hypodermic syringe on the beach.

What the McSpaddens found Sunday morning was not unique to Slaughter Beach.

From there south to Lewes and Cape Henlopen, beaches were littered with trash and small amounts of medical waste ranging from hypodermic syringes to medicine containers to an IV fluids bag. There also were personal hygiene products.

So far, the litter hasn't made its way south to the ocean beaches.

Rehoboth Beach City Manager Gregory Ferrese said he touched base with lifeguards Wednesday morning and had no reports of excessive trash or medical waste.

State environmental officials suspect the trash is probably waste from Pennsylvania that entered the Delaware River during flooding from Hurricane Irene and the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee.

Wind and currents likely brought it into Delaware Bay, and then on Saturday afternoon and evening strong winds carried it to beaches on the Delaware side of the bay.

"We've been here full time 14 to 15 years," Bill McSpadden said. "And I've been coming here all of my life. We've been through nor'easters" and the debris that washes in then, "but it's nothing like this."

McSpadden said that when neighbors started telling him about the medical waste, he pulled out data cards from the cleanup and discovered that some disposable needles also were picked up Saturday.

Many of the needles that people have reported finding are white with black lettering. Some have tip covers and some do not. They often are entangled with grass and other debris.

Michael Globetti of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control said the agency is trying to hold a second coastal cleanup to address all the litter and help the small coastal communities cope.

State officials said the hardest-hit areas seem to be Slaughter Beach and Broadkill Beach, but at Fowler Beach (which is part of Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge), there was so much debris it "looked as if a recycling truck had gone off a bridge," Shawna McSpadden said.

There were whole trees, 55-gallon drums, hard hats and shoes among the mix, she said.

At Cape Henlopen, the trash was as heavy as anyone remembered seeing it, Globetti said.

One reason state officials and community residents want to get the trash picked up and properly disposed of is because they don't want it to wash back into Delaware Bay. Much of the trash, especially the plastic bags and latex balloons with attached strings, can be harmful to sea life.

And medical waste is a huge health and safety concern.

It is likely that the waste originated far upstream.

At Slaughter Beach, there was a tattered, coated paper sign among the debris. It read: "Closed to fishing from March 1 to 8 a.m. on the opening day of regular trout season in April. Please respect the landowner. Do not litter ... Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission."

Beth Yost doesn't blame the folks in Pennsylvania. She figures they probably disposed of the trash properly, but flooding washed it into the Delaware River.

Yost, who cleaned up the debris in front of her Slaughter Beach home, said she wished she could pull her granddaughter out of school for a day just to show her what "post-consumer waste" is all about.

As Yost and her husband, Michael, worked to clean up the area near their house, she discovered a hypodermic needle.

Her husband spent the next several hours raking through the reeds to make sure he got everything.

"I don't want my grandkids out here digging in it," he said.

He was annoyed by something else he found.

"Take a look at this," he said. The seat of a wooden chair was full of balls — plastic balls of many shapes and sizes and golf balls called floaters that are designed to float in water.

"They are never going to decompose," he said, as he held up one of the golf balls.

In Lewes, the beach was covered with plastic bottles, cups and lids on Sunday morning. There also were large tree limbs, huge pieces of driftwood and a large part of a tree. There were pieces of wood that once were part of a split-rail fence, drywall buckets and a long-stemmed red rose.

Also among the garbage were seed pods from trees that don't normally grow this close to the beach: walnuts and acorns.

Municipal crews worked Wednesday to move the large pieces off the beach.

At Broadkill Beach, Janice and Michael Walls spent hours picking up plastic and wood.

One of their neighbors also found a syringe.

But mostly, Janice Walls said, "there was a tremendous amount of plastic bottles."

Ironically, she said, the day before the beach cleanup, "the beach was pristine. It was just gorgeous."

She recalled thinking: "There's really nothing for people to pick up."

Then, Sunday morning, Michael Walls said, "we just saw debris, debris."

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Information from: The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., http://www.delawareonline.com

23 Sep, 2011

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