By Scott Brinton
Surrounding Young are hundreds, even thousands of bottles, cans and other assorted trash. The garbage angers him. Seeing the roughly 35 to 50 volunteers who came out to clean it up delights the civic activist.
Young, who has begun an "America the Beautiful" campaign locally, and Robert Weltner, president of the Freeport-based, non-profit group SPLASH (Stop Polluting, Littering and Save Harbors), organized the cleanup.
Volunteers, who came from Merrick, Freeport and as far as Malverne, met at the municipal boat launch on Albany Avenue in Freeport. They were then ferried in small motorboats to the numerous tiny islands that are scattered amid the waterways between Merrick and Freeport.
Volunteers picked up and pulled out every sort of garbage, from plastic coolers to rusted automobile parts. Mostly, they collected cans and bottles, which are carried from streams to the north, through storm-water drains, and finally deposited in the saltwater wetlands.
The wetlands serve as a breeding ground for a variety of fish and birds, which increasingly are having trouble finding space to build their nests. On Sunday, Young found an abandoned swan's nest hidden in a patch of reeds. The nest, which was constructed half of reeds and half of garbage, was surrounded by broken glass. Four unhatched, perfectly-intact eggs remained in the nest. Weltner said the eggs likely got wet during a high tide, and the chicks inside died. The mother swan then left the nest to begin a new family.
Volunteers also uncovered hundreds of dead fiddler crabs, which are easily trapped in their mud-soaked holes by a simple plastic bag and suffocated.
The wetlands, said Weltner, are under enormous pressure from industrial polluters as well as average homeowners. "This area has taken a serious environmental beating," said Weltner, as he stood on a beach at the point in Freeport.
A year and a half ago, the 500-member SPLASH conducted sediment testing at the bottom of the waterways off Freeport and Merrick, and found concentrations of PCBs "as high as the Hudson River," as well as heavy metals, which are dumped by factories and other businesses.
SPLASH also discovered DDD, which is formed as the now-banned pesticide DDT breaks down.
And the group uncovered high levels of other pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, which are washed into South Shore bays from people's yards through storm-water drains.
Weltner noted that South Shore bays are the recipients of pollution not only from Nassau County, but also from Jamaica Bay in Queens.
Young said Sunday's cleanup was the first of many planned for the area. SPLASH and America the Beautiful are organizing a 10-site cleanup in October along the South Shore, from Freeport to Seaford and north to the Southern State Parkway.
Two to four SPLASH volunteers conduct cleanups of the waters between Merrick and Freeport daily. Anyone interested in getting involved may call SPLASH at (516) 378-4770. Weltner said the group is seeking volunteers from Merrick-Bellmore.
